Award Recipients: Dr. Dorothy J. Gish Women in Leadership Award
Award recipients
Feature Recipient Stories:
Spring 2025 Recipient, Jordyn Thompson
This summer, I had the opportunity to travel to Kansas City, Missouri for the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences Annual Conference. Through this conference, I got to be a guest speaker at a breakout session titled "Navigating Student Engagement in AAFCS", where the Student Unit panel discussed how professionals can help get their students involved in professional organizations. We also shared involvement opportunities that students have through the AAFCS organization. I also was an emcee for a general session titled "Food for Thought". Through this conference, I gained valuable leadership experience, teaching materials, and networked with other FCS professionals and students. I am very grateful the Gish Award helped me get there!
Spring 2024 Recipient, Rachel Huang
I had an amazing time attending and presenting at the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology conference (EMBC) in Orlando, Florida. We were able to stay at the conference hotel, which was at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, which meant that we could easily attend events and network with other conference attendees at the hotel.
On the first night of the conference, I attended an “EMBC Students and Young Professionals” reception where I talked to several current PhD students. In addition to telling me about their research, they gave me a lot of insight into what daily life was like in graduate school and helpful tips on finding a program and a professor in a field that I am interested in.
On Thursday, I presented my poster “Initial Design of a Low-Cost Digital Stethoscope” during the afternoon session. During the session, I had great conversations with several graduate students or professionals in the field of cardiac signal processing. Since it is the largest international biomedical engineering conference in the world, there were a lot of attendees with different backgrounds and industry experiences. One of the attendees I got to talk to was from Portugal and worked for a company focused on cardiac signal processing in developing countries. He was especially interested in the digital stethoscope since it was intentionally low-cost to be used in developing countries and wanted to see if the work would be continuing.
On the last day of the conference, I shared my work titled “Design of an Electromechanical Ankle-Foot Orthosis with Controlled Locking and Dorsiflexion Assist” in an oral presentation. This lecture was presented along with several other papers, primarily PhD research, in the “Lower Limb rehabilitation and Assistance Robots” category. I had a valuable experience getting to present my work alongside graduate and professional presenters and I was able to learn a lot about where the field is advancing.
I am incredibly grateful that I was able to attend the conference and share both of my projects, with one officially being a published paper through the conference. I am especially grateful to have meet several people in the field and learn about where their work is advancing current biomedical research.