Women in Circuits and Systems (WiCAS) at ICECS 2022
A “Women in Circuits and Systems” (WiCAS) event took place during the 29th IEEE International Conference on Electronics Circuits and Systems (ICECS), the flagship conference for the Region 8 of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS). The WiCAS events traditionally aim to inspire and motivate students, young professionals and researchers in the domain of circuits and systems to have efficient roles in their professions, by meeting successful female engineers and professors, through interesting technical and professional talks in fields of interest of CASS.
The ICECS 2022 WiCAS event was held on October 25th, 2022, organized by Giulia Di Capua (University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy), Eve McGlynn (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom) and Yoko Uwate (Tokushima University, Japan). The WiCAS event included a panel discussion, driven by the theme “Building Up Your Network: Academic Collaboration and Gender Balance”. The event involved the participation of three amazing and inspiring speakers: Dr. Elisabetta Chicca (University of Groningen, The Netherlands), Dr. Lina Mohjazi (University of Glasgow, UK), and Dr. Ilke Ercan (TU Delft, The Netherlands).
The WiCAS panelists were all women in leadership positions, with proven excellent record of accomplishment in their fields of research. Their research and experience span from brain-inspired computation and neuromorphic engineering, to 5G wireless technologies, from machine learning to nano-computing and physical information theory. The WiCAS speakers not only shared their research interests, but also precious experiences and advices with the conference attendees. The panel discussion was a lively and well-attended session on the impact of gender gap and cognitive biases in women’s career.
After the session, a WiCAS cocktail was organized to thank all the attendees for their participation. Promotional WiCAS items were distributed to all the participants during the social event.
During the conference, awards were assigned for the best contributions presented in the frame of WiCAS competition. All WiCAS winners were announced during the ICECS 2022 awarding ceremony. Three awards were assigned. The “WiCAS Best Paper Award” was assigned to Yijing Zhang, from the Integrated Circuits Group of the Eindhoven University of Technology (Eindhoven, The Netherlands), for the paper titled “Preamplifier Design Strategies for Capacitive Sensing of Electrophysiological Signals”. Two “WiCAS Best Poster Awards” were also assigned: to Johanna Munoz, from the Mechatronics Engineering Academic Area, Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica (Cartago, Costa Rica), for the paper titled “Digital Approaches on Frequency Tuning for Magnetoelectric Sensors”, and to Maria Cerezo-Sanchez, from the Microelectronics Lab of the School of Engineering, University of Glasgow (UK), for the paper titled “Flexible Neural Probe Modelling for Optimal Microelectrode-Tissue Interaction”.
The WiCAS co-chairs express their gratitude to the ICECS 2022 organizing committee and in particular the Conference Catalysts, LLC, for the technical support received in the definition of the WiCAS sessions. The WiCAS co-chairs also thank the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for the financial support that helped making these events a great moment of professional and personal enrichment.
This report was contributed by Giulia Di Capua.