Working today with a focus on tomorrow
Event showcases how NYU Tandon is solving tomorrow's problems and closing the STEM gender gap
At the Tandon Tomorrow event (left to right): graduate student Daniela Blanco, NYU President Andrew Hamilton, alumnus Bertha Jimenez, NYU Tandon Board Chair Chandrika Tandon, Professor Elza Erkip, Professor Andrea Silverman, and Dean Jelena Kovačević
We’re a school with a storied past. Since our founding in 1854, our faculty members, students, and alumni have been making important contributions to the world — revolutionizing communications, improving healthcare, building vital infrastructure, increasing the security of computer systems, and so much more.
For far too long, however, at engineering schools across the nation, women were excluded from those stories. It was not until 1907 that a woman earned a degree from what was then known as the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and not until World War II that the School began enrolling women in any significant number. The interest and aptitude of those pioneering spirits signaled the start of a change in the way women were regarded in the world of science and technology, and that change is ongoing.
Now under the leadership of the first female dean in our history, the Tandon of today is an increasingly diverse, welcoming, and inclusive place, and those who attended our Tandon Tomorrow event on March 21 got to see a few examples of the impressive work that can take place in that kind of environment.
They strolled Tandon’s MakerSpace for hands-on demonstrations of multidisciplinary student projects, including a vertical farm and an off-road vehicle built from the ground up. They heard inspiring stories from our newest entrepreneurs:
- Bertha Jimenez, the alum who created RISE Products, which is tackling the problem of food waste by using spent grain from breweries to mill a nutritious flour
- Daniela Blanco, the graduate student who co-founded Sunthetics, a startup dedicated to cleaner chemical manufacturing methods
They also learned about the research being conducted by :
- Assistant Professor of Civil and Urban Engineering Andrea Silverman, who is developing sustainable and appropriate wastewater treatment systems
- Institute Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Elza Erkip, renowned for her pioneering work in the field of wireless communications
So what’s in store for Tandon Tomorrow? We hope you’ll watch and find out.
