Women in electronics - making a difference

At the tender age of 20, Deanna Hood is something of a dynamo in that she has helped design life-changing electronic technologies and completed a double degree in maths and electrical engineering at Queensland University with a near perfect grade point average, earning her a university medal.

To add to her accolades she is also a TED Worldwide Talent Search finalist and has now moved to Europe to start an Erasmus Mundus European Master of Computer Vision and Robotics scholarship, one of seven offered internationally to non-European residents.

Deanna is among few Australians to win a two-year scholarship worth about $60,000 which will allow her to study in France, Spain and Scotland as part of her degree. 

She sees engineering as the new caring profession but as an ambassadress she confesses to coming into engineering by accident.

“It was a fluke for me that I chose to study engineering and that’s part of the reason why I try really hard to get its name out there,” she says.

“I have always enjoyed science and technology but it’s the practical application and the fact that you can work on projects that can change the world that attracts me to engineering.”

While at university, Deanna was president of the Women in Engineering Club and in 2010 founded the Big Sister-Little Sister peer mentoring program that supports more than 70% of first-year women engineering students.

“If we can tell people, girls in particular, that they can make a difference through technology and science, we can engage them in the future.”

She is aware of the ability of her chosen profession to help others.

“I think a lot of girls go into nursing, teaching and social work because they like to help people.  For me, as an engineer, I can still have the satisfying feeling of making a difference while getting my fix of science and maths,” she says.

For six months she worked in medical electronics at Melbourne University developing low-cost mobile phone technology that could help healthcare workers in developing countries diagnose pneumonia in children.

Her final year student research at Queensland University was spent focused on helping paralysed patients communicate through a brain-computer interface she helped develop.  This ongoing work may, in the future, help paralysed people control a car using EEG electrodes technology, and it was this research, she says, that opened her eyes to the potential of engineering.

Deanna’s TED talk, called ‘My Apollo 13 Moment in Disease Diagnosis’, earned her a place in the TED2013 world talent search find. She could be among 20 people selected to speak at the annual TED conference in California in 2013.

TED is an organisation designed to bring together and spread ideas worth spreading. It began in 1984 as a conference drawing people from the three worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design.  Two annual conferences, one in Scotland and the other in California, bring together the thinkers and doers who are challenged to give the talk of their lives within 18 minutes.

For young Deanna her engineering experience is just a beginning. Reflecting on her achievements so far, she says: “I just worked hard instinctively.  I guess because of that, my age has never been an unsurmountable barrier for me.”