The Most Inspiring Engineer of the Year

By Nancy Salim

NOTE: This is an overview of the entire article, which appeared in the December 2011 issue of the IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine.
Click here to read the entire article.

Sunita Chauhan

Sunita Chauhan was declared the winner, out of five other nominees, on the basis of her inspiring contributions to the advancement of technology for humanitarian purposes. Her minimally invasive biomechatronic approach for breast cancer surgery is based on the objectives of developing minimally invasive and non-invasive surgery for breast cancer treatment using a robotic approach. Chauhan holds four international patents granted on these systems and in 2006 was awarded the public sector innovation award by TEC (the Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore). According to Chauhan, women are a minority in engineering disciplines in all parts of the world, and because of that she believes it’s important to inspire young girls to adopt a career in engineering and to give them opportunities to learn from role models.

As to why she chose engineering as her field of study, Chauhan says it was her curiosity and passion to learn the “what, how, and why?” of things that led her on the engineering path. “I have liked tackling new mathematical riddles and challenges since childhood, and I cherished physics in solving many of my queries, especially the ‘why’ part,” she says.

After earning her master’s in instrumentation and control engineering, Chauhan says she worked for about five years in national scientific organizations and institutions such as the Central Scientific Instruments Organization (CSIO), in Chandigarh, India, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Delhi. Chauhan says she also held concurrent academic visiting positions at the University of Delhi, India, as well as being the director of research and development at an educational robotics company in New Delhi.

Since April 1999, Chauhan has been working at NTU at the school of mechanical and aerospace engineering. She was assistant professor in the systems and engineering management division until September 2005 and then went on to become associate professor at the mechatronics and design division where she works today.

When asked what she enjoys most about her job, Chauhan says, “teaching keeps me energetically alive through interactions and exchange of knowledge with the most enthusiastic group of society – students. It has never stopped amazing me. I have a child’s excitement to learn and impart new knowledge, to find solutions to technically challenging problems that will positively impact people’s lives and to reinvent myself at each and every stage.”