IEEE PES Women in Power, Denmark section, News report

On the afternoon of May 31st, the ‘‘Women in Power: Females in Research’’ event was successfully held at the Center for Electric Power and Energy (CEE), Department of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). The purpose was to initiate a new subgroup under the IEEE PES Women in Power (WiP) committee for all female power and energy researchers in Denmark, in order to encourage young female researchers in electrical engineering to be more confident, by sharing their personal experiences and talking to role models. If you want to support or join the new subgroup in Denmark under the IEEE PES WiP committee, you are welcome to contact Jiawei Wang, [email protected].

The event was initiated by several PhDs and Postdoctoral researchers from CEE. Other than the initiators, several other CEE employees participated, including the Communications Officer Rikke Høm Jensen from the department. Senior researcher Yi Zong from CEE gave a presentation. Due to the Covid-19 limitations, the event was a hybrid of online and physical.

The initiators firstly gave a short introduction, where they discussed their motivations for starting the IEEE WiP subgroup. These include bringing awareness to the challenges of being a woman in the research field of power and energy, as well as offering a platform for sharing personal experiences. In addition, the initiators would like to address some specific questions related to diversity, such as: why are there few female professors in the field in Denmark? what is keeping female power and energy researchers back from a career in academia?

Many of the participants experience that they are less risk-taking and confident at the beginning of their career than their male colleagues. They also feel stressed and peer-pressured by male colleagues who do not show when they are insecure. Many of the women lack perspectives and guidance from female role models.

After the introduction, Senior Researcher Yi Zong gave a presentation entitled ‘’Female in Research – My experience at CEE/DTU’’.
In her presentation, Yi Zong introduced her experiences in academia, since she joined CEE in 2007 as a postdoctoral researcher. She has been involved in 10+ research projects including Horizon 2020, Energy Technology Development and Demonstration Program (EUDP), Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD) and Sino-Danish projects. Apart from her research, she is also in charge of project management, teaching two bachelor and master courses, coordinating a DANIDA (Danish International Development Agency) course, and supervising PhD and master students. She received many awards, such as Best Paper Award, Outstanding reviewer, and CEE Award, which she sees as the outcomes of her hardworking attitude and fruitful results.

Yi Zong also shared her experience as a female in a male dominated working environment. Her best advice to young female researchers is to enhance their professional knowledge and expertise and to be optimistic. As she sees, fewer females in the research area indicates more opportunities for women. In her experience, self-confidence will naturally grow when facing difficulties and challenges, such as managing multiple tasks of teaching, research and supervising. Lastly, she shared her experience on balancing family and work. Yi Zong stressed that her success was partly due to her husband’s strong support.

After the presentation, the event participants had the opportunity to ask questions and had a short discussion. Among others, the discussion focused on how to stay confident in a male -dominated working place, and how to address biases. After this event, other discussions followed among the participants, where they shared how they relate to Yi Zong’s experience, whether they agree or not with her analysis and what they want to take from it and to apply to their own careers.

A group photograph during the event is shown below.

Speakers:
Erika Meyers, WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities
Bridget Malinowki, AECOM

Moderator:
Dr. Dana Al-Qadi, AECOM

This session featured a conversation with national thought leaders on how innovative ideas both in technology and policy can be leveraged to scale transportation electrification efforts and meet carbon reduction goals that are being set throughout the nation. Topics included Public EV charging networks in communities, importance of data in optimizing infrastructure implementation and innovative electrification and transportation concepts that can significantly reduce emissions and have long-term transformative impacts on communities.

Since July 17, 2021, heavy rainfall continues in many parts of Henan Province, Zhengzhou and 10 other cities suffered heavy floods, the disaster touched the hearts of all Chinese people. Residential, power supply, transportation, medical care, school education, and the supply of daily necessities are all in difficulty, and the consequences of the disaster are still spreading.

In the midst of this devastation, led by Chair Ruomei Li, with the help of Tencent’s public welfare platform, the Nanyang Charity Federation of Henan province helped raise funds to help the affected families in Zhengzhou, Henan province. The donation activity received a rapid response, from 8 a.m. on July 23, 2021 to 23 p.m. the event ended, a total of 147 people donated, a total of 16,793.51 yuan. The main participants are electric power scientists, most of whom are women.

The WIP Committee arranged an online meeting on 25th July 2021. It was attended by the WIP Leadership Advisory Committee representative and the WIP Committee members from different countries and regions of the world. The meeting was moderated by Dr. Ruomei Li, Chair of the PES WIP.

Dr. Ruomei Li made the opening remarks. She introduced the three main items of the meeting —to make some announcements of new structure, to look at the next activities and the future work on media working group or TV.

Romero Julia, emphasized the importance of ideas for innovative concepts. She also suggested to focus on regional focus, like specific areas that are of interest for women or on the young professional health. She expressed her willingness to facilitate to realize the good ideas of the members of WIP through funding ways etc. She encouraged to increase the student membership proportion especially in Region 1-7 comparing with the optimistic situation in Region 8-10.

Gen Li, the Vice Chair of Young professional, proposed to organize more virtual activities through collaboration between WIP members.

Lisiien Leon, Vice Chair of PES WIP, reported the activity progress of workshop and technical visit, and she suggested to set up outstanding volunteer award.

AdithyaRajeev, the web media leader, hoped to receive help from all the regional representatives. She planed firstly to find some core social media like WhatsApp or telegram group for immediate communication between WIP media group volunteers.

Jelena Ponocko, representative of UK and Ireland, reported the recent event of women in engineering in this region.

StajiWilso, Chair of Membership and representative of Chapter of India, said she is planning a virtual conference in India in September with support of PES Council chair of India, hopefully to give guidance to region 1-7 on membership development.

AJ KumarMachani, Vice Chair of PES WIP, reported the progress in the membership development and marketing, and the development of website with the situation of the pandemic.

Other attendees also shared their experience or made remarks on future planning.