By Leslie O'Neill
Sherita T. Caesar -- Vice
president of Digital Launch Deployment for
Scientific-Atlanta, in Atlanta
herita T. Caesar is used to standing
out in a crowd. A black female
mechanical engineer, she has had very few peers in her career. But
as a dedicated leader and an energetic mentor, 
Caesar is striving to
bring more young women into her chosen field -- and maintain her
meteoric rise to the top of her profession.
Raised in Chicago, Caesar took her grandmother's strong work ethic to
heart early on, working as a teacher's aid when she was 14 years old. In high school,
she
participated in a pre-engineering program for minorities through the Illinois Institute
of
Technology. She was introduced to mechanical engineering, and her course was set.
"We had to build a rocket out
of a cardboard tube and predict
its distance, acceleration, and
other variables," Caesar says.
"My team won the competition.
I declared I would be a
mechanical engineer."
From the beginning of her
career, Caesar has been driven
to achieve greater and greater
successes and quickly
recognized the importance of
finding mentors -- and, in turn,
acting as a mentor.
"In the first year working at
Motorola, I was very discouraged about the opportunities for black women," Caesar
says. "On my
one-year anniversary, I contacted the highest-ranking black woman at Motorola, Bobbi
Gutman,
and told her I was ready to leave. She talked me out of it. She's still my mentor,
she's there for
me."
After taking her place as the highest-ranking black female at Motorola and moving
on to become a
vice president at Scientific-Atlanta, Caesar is using her power as a role model to
teach young
women about the opportunities in engineering. Like her grandmother and her mother
before her,
Caesar wants to be a woman who makes a difference for other women.
"I have a rule of thumb: Always try to prepare for the next opportunity,"
Caesar explains. "I'm
constantly thinking of how to do it better, how to develop my people to do it better,
how to be
successful to get to the next job. Make sure you know where you want to go. Always
be ready for
the audition -- it will come."
The Pathfinder
By Renée Gotcher
Thelma Estrin, Ph.D. --
Professor Emerita University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA)
lthough history had a hand in leading
Thelma Estrin down an
engineering path, she credits her lifelong course of technical
leadership and innovation to her supportive husband, personal
determination and tenacity, and a good sense of humor. At a time
when many men, including Estrin's then new husband, were recruited out
of the United States at the onset of World War II, Estrin found herself in
an unlikely position for a woman: working as a machinist, then
technician, for a New York radio receptor company. At the same time, her husband
was serving in
the Army's signal corps, where he became fascinated with communications technology.
The
couple later decided to pursue their newfound interests and enrolled in the University
of
Wisconsin's engineering program.
"If that had not occurred,
I
would've never gotten into
engineering," Estrin says. "I
didn't know any engineers or
any women in these fields. My
husband was my only
engineering peer, and my
strongest supporter."
When her husband was offered
a job at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton
University to work with John
von Neumann, Estrin tried to
land a job close by with RCA
but was turned down because "they said they didn't have a women's bathroom,"
Estrin recalls.
So she joined the EEG Laboratory at Columbia's Presbyterian Neurological Institute
in New York
-- commuting all the way from Princeton, N.J. -- as a biomedical engineer. The couple
later moved
to Israel to help build the first electronic computer in the Middle East. Upon their
return in 1961,
Estrin took her combined talents in computer science and biomedical research to UCLA,
where
she helped start the Brain Research Institute's Data Processing Laboratory. She was
among the
first to translate brain signals into digital data.
"I decided early on that this was going to be my career, and I wasn't really
deterred by the people
who thought it was funny or amusing," Estrin says.
Estrin also balanced her love for her career with her dedication to her family --
a struggle that she
says is still a major issue for women on her track. But the "late nights and
early mornings"
required have paid off. Her three daughters have all followed Estrin down a technical
path: Margo
is a physician, Judith is now Cisco's chief technology officer, and Deborah is a
computer science
professor at the University of Southern California.
Dr. Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus
-- Institute professor of electrical
engineering and physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT), in Cambridge, Mass.
hether delving into the mysterious
world of fullerenes and
nanotubes, reading a book cover-to-cover in one sitting, or
playing the violin, Dr. Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus tackles all
she does with passion and focus.
As a professor of electrical
engineering and physics at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), Dresselhaus
tackles career obstacles in much
the same way. She relates a
frustrating experience during
her first postdoctoral job as a
research staff member at the
MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the
late 1960s.