Dr. Patricia Grubel from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was one of a handful of IEEE life members that attended the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference (WIE ILC) in June 2022.
Pat has had an interesting engineering career path, which brought her to LANL later in her career with a newly minted PhD. While she started at the lab as a post-doctoral fellow, she quickly was promoted to a Computer Scientist and Research Software Engineer. She recently started leading a team focused on Workflow Orchestration System for Containerized Applications, and is a champion for reproducibility, productivity, and sustainability in scientific computing. She attended the conference to work on her management skills and to engage with other application engineers. Through the conference she was able to meet new people, several of whom she felt had similar life experiences. She also received encouragement around her new team leader position.
When asked what other life members might get out of the IEEE WIE ILC, she said, “The ILC is a great place to connect with other women and men in leadership roles, as well as some who are working towards leadership. We talk about diversity all the time and it is important that those who have vast experience relay some of that experience to those who are still on the path to gain it.” We hope that other life members take their encouragement from Pat and consider attending in 2023 in San Diego.
