How IEEE Awardee Karen Panetta Became Bewitched by Engineering

When considering the 1960s sitcoms Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both of which featured women with supernatural powers navigating life with mortals, most people wouldn’t connect them with pursuing an engineering career. But Karen Panetta did. The sitcoms’ main characters—Samantha Stevens, a witch; and Jeannie, a genie—were “strong, empowered female leads using magic,” Panetta says, and they inspired her to become an engineer, as it was like sorcery to her.

Panetta, an IEEE Fellow, is dean of graduate education at the Tufts University engineering school, in Medford, Mass., outside of Boston.

Karen Panetta

Employer

Tufts University, in Medford, Mass.

Title

Dean of the engineering school’s graduate education

Member grade

IEEE Fellow

Alma maters

Boston University and Northeastern University in Boston

Like Samantha and Jeannie, Panetta has made magic happen, such as when she helped to invent the first CPU digital-twin simulator. Digital twins are computer simulation programs that track and adjust the operations of a physical device in detail. Her simulator has been adapted for several industrial uses, including by NASA to help design spacecraft.

Panetta also mentors young women to encourage them to pursue a STEM career through the Nerd Girls program she launched at Tufts in 2000. Engineering undergraduate students work on technology for socially conscious projects such as environmental cleanup, renewable energy, and the development of assistive devices to improve mobility for people with disabilities.

Panetta received this year’s IEEE Mildred Dresselhaus Medal for “contributions to computer vision and simulation algorithms, and for leadership in developing programs to promote STEM careers.” The award, sponsored by Google, was presented at the IEEE Honors Ceremony on 24 April in New York City.

Receiving the medal is particularly special to Panetta, she says, because she knew its namesake: Mildred Dresselhaus, an IEEE Life Fellow who pioneered the study of carbon nanostructures at a time when researching physical and material properties of commonplace atoms was unpopular. She was a MIT professor of physics and electrical engineering, and died in 2017.

Panetta nominated Dresselhaus for the IEEE Medal of Honor, which she received in 2015.

“Millie was a rock star,” Panetta says. “I can’t think of another medal that really encapsulates her spirit and what I’ve dedicated my life to.”

Finding a creative outlet in engineering

As a child growing up in Boston, Panetta built trapdoors and other features in her treehouse, she says.

“I also explored fashion and sewed my own clothes,” she adds. “I wasn’t very successful, but I was very creative.”

She was a top performer in math and science classes in high school, so her father encouraged her to pursue civil engineering.

“I didn’t know what an engineer was, and my father, who was a mechanic working on heavy construction equipment, only knew about civil engineers,” Panetta says. “I started taking computer programming classes at school, but knowing how to type on a keyboard and make a software program wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to know what was inside the box.”

Her thirst for knowledge inspired her to pursue a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering at Boston University.

“My father was very disappointed that I didn’t pick civil engineering,” she says, laughing.

She commuted to school, and she struggled to find study groups for her classes, so she joined IEEE to connect with peers.

She became active in the university’s student branch, organizing events including the IEEE Student Professional Awareness Conference, which helps students learn practical career skills including résumé building, interviewing, and networking. She organized a SPAC for her branch, and IEEE Life Senior Member Jim Watson volunteered to speak at the event. It changed her life, she says.

Watson was the director of commercial and industrial marketing at Ohio Edison in Akron, where he worked for 36 years.

“He flew to Boston to speak at our event, but fewer than 20 students attended. I was embarrassed,” Panetta says. But Watson told her the important lesson was that she showed up and organized the event.

“He said I would be successful because of that,” she says. “He didn’t care about the attendees’ grade point averages, only that we were professional enough to organize the talk.

“That encouragement was the first time anyone outside of my family ever told me that I would succeed, so it was reaffirming. To this day, I still use some of the techniques that I learned in his presentation in my own classroom to teach students.”

Panetta graduated in 1986. Her IEEE membership helped her get hired for her first dream job: a diagnostic engineer at Digital Equipment Corp.

While attending the IEEE Computer Society’s annual symposium on very large-scale integration in Boston, she handed her résumé to a DEC representative, who hired her to work in Hudson, Mass.

While working full time, Panetta attended Northeastern University, in Boston, as a part-time graduate student. She earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1988.

Developing the first CPU digital twin

In the early 1990s, Panetta was assigned to work with Ernst Ulrich, one of DEC’s most respected consulting engineers, she says. He was developing a new CPU using millions of CMOS transistors.

“I thought, ‘Wow, what a great opportunity,’” she says, “not realizing they assigned it to me because no one else wanted to work with him, as he set rigorous standards, expecting those who worked with him to think outside of the box and hold their own to bullet-proof new concepts.”

Panetta and Ulrich wanted the ability to test the CPU while still designing the hardware and software. That way, both would be ready to use at the same time. Typically, the hardware was developed before the software was written.

“We decided that we were going to simulate the machine to see how it was going to run—which was unheard of,” she says.

During a meeting with the company’s top engineers, Panetta shared her idea for an algorithm that could accomplish the team’s goal. She was met with silence.
“It’s going to be the engineers who better society because we know how to work together. We’ve proven that IEEE members know how to work across geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and gender boundaries. And that’s a good model for the world.”

“I thought to myself, ‘Did I just say something stupid?’” she says. “But then, the top engineer looked at me and said, ‘I have been doing this for 50 years, and you, a kid just out of school, comes up with this [solution] like it’s obvious.’”

Her idea became the basis for the digital twin simulator. It used behavioral models to run software on a CPU simulation. The software passes information through the system, she says, just like it would pass information through wires or interconnects.

“We did successfully have a complete model of millions of transistors,” Panetta says. “I efficiently simulated hundreds of thousands of experiments and ran the software on this simulated model so that we knew exactly how it was going to perform on the real machine. That had never been done before.”

Her groundbreaking work led to a promotion: from computer analyst to principal software engineer.

When she began managing a team and hiring staff members, Panetta noticed the younger employees knew the theory but didn’t have the technical skills to hit the ground running, she says.

“It took the company two years to train somebody before they could really contribute technically to a team,” she says. She decided she wanted to help prepare students for jobs in industry.

In 1995 she was accepted into DEC’s Engineers and Education program, in which full-time employees who wanted to teach could take a leave of absence to complete a degree while still being paid. Participants were then placed in academic institutions for two-year stints to help students bridge the gap between classroom theory and real-world problem-solving.

After earning a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Northeastern in 1994, Panetta began her teaching assignment at Tufts. After one year, she left her job at DEC to join the university as its first female electrical engineering professor. At the time, the department had only one female undergraduate EE student.

“I showed up to work dressed in an all-pink suit,” she says, laughing. “Other professors looked at me like I didn’t belong there because I looked different.”

She didn’t let that stand in the way of reaching her goals: preparing the next generation of students for jobs and mentoring young women who were interested in becoming engineers but who felt they wouldn’t be accepted and therefore couldn’t pursue a career in the field.

Launching the Nerd Girls program

When Panetta began teaching, she noticed that students weren’t getting any hands-on engineering experience, so in 1996 she created an internship program. It was the precursor to Nerd Girls.

At the time, she was consulting for NASA’s data visualization and animation lab in Langley, Va., translating complex information into a user-friendly animated form. The programs visualized Earth’s atmosphere and identified pollutants, their origins, and their effects on people and the environment.

Panetta needed a larger team to help conduct the research, so she asked her undergraduate students if they wanted to participate.

“Female students flocked to me because they could relate to the work I was doing, loved how their skills could benefit humanity, and didn’t see me as the classic nerd professor with no life,” Panetta said in a 2008 interview with The Institute about the program. “Eventually, the girls outnumbered the boys.”

“The research project ended up winning awards,” she added. “Tufts couldn’t believe that undergrads had a hand in it. That’s when things really turned around.”

Nerd Girls officially launched at Tufts in 2000 as a class where students work closely with industry on engineering projects. Examples have included building a solar-powered car, developing a battery for the last functioning twin lighthouse in the United States, and creating devices to help people train service animals.

“Everyone who has participated in the program graduated with a bachelor’s degree,” Panetta says. “I’m also very proud that 98 percent of participants pursue a graduate degree within three years of earning their bachelor’s.”

The program is open to all students, regardless of gender.

Creating a community at IEEE

Panetta became an active IEEE volunteer in 2004 after meeting Arthur Winston, the IEEE president at the time. Winston, an IEEE Life Fellow, was an electrical engineering professor at Tufts. He helped found the Gordon Institute, a leadership-focused engineering school at the university.

“I sat next to him on a bus, and he invited me to attend the IEEE Boston Section meetings,” she says.

Panetta eventually was elected by the section as a member-at-large—which allowed her to attend conferences and other events.

To help spread the word about the Nerd Girls program throughout IEEE, Winston connected Panetta to Mary Ellen Randall, who was chair of IEEE Women in Engineering at the time. Randall is the current IEEE president and CEO. Panetta joined IEEE WIE and was elected as its 2007–2009 chair.

In that position, she worked with Randall and Leah Jamieson, the 2007 IEEE president, to hire more staff to support the program and launch its magazine.

“At that time, we didn’t have any way to connect to members or tell the stories of women in technology,” Panetta says. “I wanted people to read the stories of women from around the globe and how they overcame adversity. So I launched the IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine in 2007.”

Panetta serves as the award-winning publication’s editor in chief, and she is a member of several other IEEE societies and committees.

IEEE is helping to change the world for the better, she says.

“It’s going to be the engineers who better society,” she says, “because we know how to work together.

“We’ve proven that IEEE members know how to work across geographic boundaries, ethnic boundaries, and gender boundaries. And that’s a good model for the world.” ...