The problem solvers

Mechanical engineering is typically a male dominated field but at Macquarie University a group of talented women are changing that.

Dr Ming Li, Dr Fatemeh Salehi and Dr Supriya Pillai are among the talented females that are changing the face of engineering at Macquarie University.

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Mechanical engineering is typically a male dominated field but at Macquarie University a group of talented women are changing that.

Dr Fatemeh Salehi and Dr Ming Li are lecturers in mechanical engineering at the university and they are part of a team where there are now more females than males.

It has not always been that way for them though.

As an undergraduate in China, male students in Dr Li’s classes outnumbered females 13:1.

For Dr Salehi, who studied aerospace engineering in Iran, just one in 10 students in her undergraduate classes were women.

“We didn’t have any female lecturers,” she said.

Mechanical engineering lecturers Dr Ming Li and Dr Fatemeh Salehi at Macquarie University.

When she applied for her first internship, the company had never had a female engineer before.

“I was the first female working there,” she said.

Years later, Dr Fatemeh and Dr Li are part of the growing wave of female engineers.

Now lecturers, they have noticed that while the number of female students in their own classes has not increased significantly since they were students, the number of females amongst their colleagues has.

That is in part due to Macquarie University’s Gender Equity Strategy, which led the School of Engineering to seek out and recruit talented females and resulted in a now female dominated mechanical engineering division.

“I think it’s a good time to be a woman in engineering,” Dr Salehi said.

Dr Li and Dr Salehi come from a family of mathematicians and scientists, but they know not everyone is immersed in the industry from a young age.

They suggest workshops, talks and university visits to teach young women about engineering.

“It’s important that students know, people know, what engineering is about … and what they can do with engineering,” Dr Salehi said.

For Dr Li and Dr Salehi, being able to “see the impact of your work” generates huge amounts of satisfaction and their scope as mechanical engineers is much wider than people think.

Dr Salehi’s projects have included designing effective drug delivery systems so that, for example, an inhaler gives the right amount of medication to the right part of the nose to treat chronic rhinosinusitis.

Dr Li has looked at how microalgae can be engineered to produce low-cost jet fuel and how to isolate rare cancer cells from the billions of blood cells in small blood samples taken from our bodies.

Put simply, they are problem solvers.

“Everything you see around yourself is designed by an engineer,” Dr Salehi said.