Table of Contents

Section I: Introduction.- Energetic Trailblazers: Kate Gleason, Edith Clarke, and Maria Telkes.- Mechanical Engineering Micronarratives and/as Changing Stories of Women in STEM.- In Pursuit of an Inclusive Learning Environment in Engineering.- Section II: New Perspectives.- Educating the Next Generation of Mechanical Engineers in Fluid-Thermal Sciences.- Circular Systems and the Culture of Collaboration.- How to Stop Imposter Syndrome from Sabotaging Your Career.- From Brazil to the World: The Journey of a Fluid Dynamics Experimentalist.- Remaining Curious: Re-thinking Contributions and Opportunities as Mechanical Engineers.- The Changing Landscape of Mechanical Engineering: Learning to Embrace my Ecofeminist Identity within the Elitism of Engineering.- Section III: Research/Technical.- From Watching Planes in the Sky to Making Turbines More Efficient.- Non-linear Pathways into Mechanical Engineering.- My Journey from Fixing the Lawnmower to a Career in Fuels and Combustion.- Do Pipeline Engineers Want to Pollute the Environment?.- Intelligent Control to Reduce Vehicle Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions.- Silicon Solar Photovoltaics: Slow Ascent to Exponential Growth.- From Nuclear Engineering to Roller Coasters: The Ride of a Lifetime.- Section IV: Career Journeys.- Unveiling My Engineering Identity.- Connected by the Environment: The Unique yet Intertwined Journeys of Two Energy and Water Researchers.- From Spacecrafts to Biocomposites: The Story of a Shuttle Launch, a Recession, a Surprise Doctorate, and Motherhood.- My Most Valuable Lessons in Energy Engineering.- I Never Claimed to be a Lady.- Severing the Links of the ‘Gordian Knot’: Envisioning Doctoral-Level Engineering Education and Workforce Sustainability as a Key to Environmental Sustainability.

About the Author

Professor Margaret Bailey, Ph.D., P.E. is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering within the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology. Appointments at RIT include the Founding Director of AdvanceRIT Program (2012-2020), the Co-Chair of the President’s Commission on Women (2007-2020), the inaugural Sr. Faculty Associate to the Provost for Women Faculty (2010 –2018), the Founding Director of WE@RIT (2004-2011) and the inaugural Kate Gleason Endowed Chair (2003-2009). Dr. Bailey teaches courses and conducts research related to Thermodynamics, engineering and public policy, engineering education, and gender in engineering and science. Professor Bailey serves as the Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI on several NSF funded efforts, including the RIT ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) grant (2012-2019, PI), the ADVANCE IT-Catalyst grant (2008-2011, PI), the ADVANCE Partnership grant focused on faculty salary equity practices and study (2021-2026, co-PI), and a PFE:RIEF grant focused on "Understanding the Relationships between Gender, Self-Efficacy, and Extracurricular Activities in the Professional Formation of Engineers" (2021-2023, co-PI). The projects that she has led have resulted in impactful new programs, practices, and policies as well as a dedicated ADVANCE unit within the Office of the Provost and the women in engineering center, WE@RIT, within the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, both of which have been nationally recognized. In 2008, WE@RIT received the WEPAN Women in Engineering Program Award in recognition of the program’s offerings and impact for diversifying engineering. More recently, in August 2021, RIT was one of ten US universities awarded the National Institute of Health (NIH) Prize for Enhancing Faculty Gender Diversity in Biomedical and Behavioral Science, which is in large part due to the impact of the RIT ADVANCE program. Dr. Bailey is also a recipient of the national Maria Mitchell Women inScience Award, the RIT Edwina Award for Gender Diversity and Inclusiveness, and the RIT Isaac L. Jordan Sr. Faculty Pluralism Award. Dr. Bailey is the co-author on an engineering textbook published through Wiley, Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics, which is used worldwide in over 250 institutions. She also co-edited Women in Mechanical Engineering - Energy and the Environment published by Springer Nature in 2022. Dr. Bailey is an author on over 85 peer-reviewed publications and a registered professional engineer in the state of NJ.
Associate Professor Laura Shackelford, Ph.D. is the Founding Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft, recent Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and Professor in the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, USA. Dr. Shackelford teaches courses and conducts research in contemporary fiction and narrative theory, digital literature, speculative and science fiction, women’s and gender studies, and feminist philosophy of science, and leads an interdisciplinary, project based, travel-enhanced Transnational Digital Creation Workshop with faculty at the University of Paris-8. She is the author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014; co-editor of Surreal Entanglements: Essays on Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction, published by Routledge Press in 2021; and co-editor of Women in Mechanical Engineering – Energy and Environment, published by Springer Nature in 2022. In addition, she has numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in prominent edited collections exploring the scientific, technological, philosophical, and cultural transformations that have grown out of post-World War II cybernetics, information, and bioinformatic sciences and cultures, and their impact on narrative practices, gender roles, and spatial relations, in particular. She is also a longstanding member of the interdisciplinary Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). Her sponsored research activity has enabled her to co-design and facilitate story-driven engineering workshops with her KEEN Engineering Unleashed collaborators in recent years and to lead a summer workshop, Gathering Stories: A Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Women for local 11th and 12th graders in the Rochester area since July 2021. In November 2021, she will join the University of Paris-8 as an Invited Professor, where she will continue to research divergent American and French histories of interactive narrative and their potential significance to interactive models for health communication and narrative medicine today.