Spotlights

Both my parents are lawyers, but my dad’s always been a tinkerer, making furniture and getting his electrician’s license to do the wiring in our home.

My parents, who are both doctors, instilled in me a love of biology.

#IAmAnEngineer: I work on developing algorithms that help robots understand the world around them, and that teach them how to move safely around humans.

When the pandemic happened, I started watching videos on the water situation in developing nations – and I was really surprised that even here in the Caribbean, where I’m from, we have countries with serious water issues.

Ethiopia, my country, is endowed with precious gifts of nature: fertile soil, a favorable climate with thirteen months of sunshine, and abundant water.

When I was a kid, I went to my older brother’s Lego League practices all the time. That’s really where I fell in love with the concept of building things that do something else.

I’m from a very small city in Turkey where my parents were physics professors at its only university.

After a childhood seeing loved ones with mental health issues struggle with incorrect diagnoses and testing out many different types of medications, I originally went to school for psychology to help advance our knowledge of mental health.

One of the things that’s really important to me is working to support marginalized youth to build the technical confidence they need to feel empowered in pursuing a STEM education, or really anything they’re passionate about.

My path to engineering started when I was 9 and went to see the movie ‘Iron Man’ with my family.

I started out as an undergraduate majoring in physics at the University of Science and Technology in China, but in my senior year I had a chance to come to Stanford, where I learned there was a whole field that uses materials science to solve practical problems, which I’m very interested in.

There’s not a lot of work being done on building habitats on other planets, but our Mars Team at the Stanford Student Space Initiative is interested in just this.

#IAmAnEngineer: I’ve always loved learning. I studied environmental engineering and eventually started a company in the environmental space, but ultimately, I really wanted to go back and do something related to human health.

#IAmAnEngineer: All my life I’ve had a passion for dance. Understanding the movement in the human body created a curiosity as to how the physical world worked, which fed my other passion for engineering.

As an engineer, you’re taught to build things, to optimize things.

Growing up, I thought I was going to be a doctor.

While I was an undergrad at MIT, I chose mechanical engineering because it was the most broad field, and it seemed like the easiest way to touch everything.

Robert Fulghum’s book is famously titled, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I say, “All I really need to know, I learned in speech therapy.”

I’m actually a third-generation civil engineer.

We met a patient the other day who was about 3 years old.

During my junior year in college, I met a few people who had been diagnosed with HIV. I was inspired by how they carried on with their lives in the face of their health challenges.