Women’s History Month
Women’s History Month, which is celebrated during the month of March, is an opportunity to celebrate the achievements in society, culture, and history that have been made by women.
At Illinois Tech, innovation and impact go hand in hand. And for more than 130 years, our faculty, students, alumni, and staff have created significant, lasting real-world change.
In particular, our community’s meaningful imprint on technology, in all forms, is indelible.
As Women’s History Month begins, it is a fitting time to celebrate the countless achievements that Illinois Tech women alumni, faculty, students, and staff have made—and continue to make.
You can learn more below about just some of the impact that they are making in shaping the future of technology.
Maximizing Social Media’s Positive Impact
For Leila Mirghaderi (Ph.D. THUM ’23), place is central to her work. But she had a desire to expand that idea further, to understand how people create a sense of space and community. At Illinois Tech, through the university’s Socially Responsible Modeling, Computation, and Design (SoReMo) initiative, she did just that. She examined the accounts of Iranian Instagram influencers to identify six strategies that influencers used to exploit their audiences, and then she created recommendations for ethical conduct that could be implemented by the platforms, through national policy, and within educational systems.
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Equity and Sustainability Through Food
Professor of Environmental Management and Sustainability Weslynne Ashton is working to harness the power of food procurement by large, public institutions in order to shift food production and distribution systems toward greater racial equity, sustainability, and resilience. As part of a $1 million grant through the National Science Foundation’s Civic Innovation Challenge, which supports pilot projects that apply emerging technologies and concepts to address community-identified challenges, Ashton and her team will examine “how institutional supply chains can integrate locally produced food. We’ll examine critical policy, economic, and practical barriers, and creatively reimagine the pathways for improving food access.”
Learn MoreA Standard of Excellence
Engineering Solutions
Alison Yurchak (BME, M.S. CHE 5th Year) always knew that she was an engineer. When she arrived at Illinois Tech, she learned how she could make a difference through engineering in medicine.
‘Leadership is Community’
Marilyn Flowers turned a passion for computing into a career path—and embraced her role as a student leader to make a difference for her community and others at Illinois Tech.
Producing Problem Solvers
As a professor at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, Emma Dosmar (Ph.D. BME ’17) is preparing the next generation of engineers to solve problems by applying the technique of “ungrading” in the courses that she teachers.
A Worthwhile Investment
There’s a reason that professors who worked with Fenglin Wang (M.S. FIN ’23) believe that she will be a success: she knows how to get things done and how to push herself toward her career goal of becoming an investor.
Bringing the Balance
Whether by increasing the number of women in STEM fields, in law, or who are inventors, Mary Kate Nowak (LAW 3rd Year) is focusing her sights and her efforts on making sure that everyone knows that representation matters.
Sydney Hardwick (ITM ’15) has found a way to merger her soft skills with the technical instincts she’s honed her entire life in her role at Visa, where she empowers designers, researchers, and engineers to create global, future-focused products and services.
Sydney Hardwick (ITM ’15)
