Meet the LTTS Women Engineers who are #EngineeringTheChange

On a gloomy monsoon day in July, the kind that saps your energy and determination to work and just stay in your bed, Mridula Prakash, our sustainability expert based in Mysore, and a gung-ho techie, focuses her unstirred spirit to create Sustainability practice roadmap for LTTS. With a career that spans from integrating system solutions, and innovating technical products to formulating sustainability strategies, Mridula has been engineering the change with us for 13 years. "It has been 13 years since I joined the LTTS team, never have I had a dull day where my skills weren't challenged enough. That's exactly what an Engineer at Heart like me craves for- A problem to solve and the art of crafting a good solution”.

"One of my favorite engineering moments at LTTS was when my team and I developed a functional safety module for an automated steering system for tractors. It was never done before and we were trying to establish a new technology in the line of safety for our customers. We had to figure out how these tractors would safely steer themselves as directed, considering parameters like speed, rollover, humans, and other environmental factors. It was challenging but we did make those tractors safer.”, mentioned Mridula, when asked about her favorite moment in her engineering journey with LTTS.

While we are in Mysore, just a few blocks away from where Mridula works, we can find Usha Diggi, a Senior Engineer in our Medical Devices practice. Usha and her colleagues have created a machine vision algorithm to automate cell culture monitoring. What does it do??

"Our solution provides an efficient non-invasive cell colony observation application and includes cell colony segmentation and its behavior recognition in a set of time series videos. This approach will improve efficiency in cell quality analysis and minimize cell wastage. Pattern recognition combined with machine vision will speed up operational time and enable continuous monitoring, which is not possible in manual methods. The same approach can be used for other cell colony observations with slight algorithmic modifications.", said Usha.?

Long story short, the study of cell behavior under different conditions can be made much more effective and efficient. Usha believes that with her innovation can someday help in the early diagnosis of grave diseases such as Cancer.

"It could be something as big as designing an off-board EV charging module for one of the biggest automobile manufacturers or it could something as simple as fixing the circuit of a LED light strip during Diwali- for an engineer, it'll always be about making things better."

We'll now have to go to Vadodara, to meet Grishma Bhatt, our ace electronics engineer. She holds a Master's degree in Power Electronics, is a Gold Medalist from Nirma University, and is a true Engineer at Heart. She started her career in academics where she taught students to fall in love with engineering and five and a half years later, she stepped into a world of circuits and hardware testing. Grishma is now responsible for designing and testing off-board EV chargers and delivering excellence to our customers.?

Let's fly to London now, where Amra Pasic, our brilliant electronics hardware engineer is helping our automotive customers create sustainable transport and meet emission norms with next-gen hardware designs. In her inspiring engineering journey of over 20 years, Amra has worked extensively in research and on the industry front in automotive.

"The best thing about engineering is that it doesn't see your gender. In my 20+ years of career, I have always been valued based on my work. Engineering always rewards innovation. Being an engineer, helping make things, new products, that people will use and benefit from makes me very happy. I relish it every day.", said Amra when asked why she loves engineering.

Let's board the flight bound back to India and fasten our seatbelts because we'll now have to travel to Mumbai to meet Anupama. Anupama Mishrikoti, our brilliant senior engineer working with our Integrated Content Management team at LTTS. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Aircraft Engineering and has been working in the Technical Publications domain for a good 7 years now.?

"Technical Publications is where we create Manuals for engineers to follow. Creating such manuals is an art in itself . It requires technical understanding, analytical skills, as well as communication and illustration skills. Manuals have to be extremely precise and accurate because engineers are expected to follow them 100%. Even a single digit error in the size of a screw can have catastrophic effects.", mentioned Anupama, when asked about how she's engineering the change for the world. You can call an engineer's guide.?

We started with Mysore, so it's only fair to end our journey there. In Mysore, we next have to meet Muthahar Fathima, our Senior Delivery Manager who has been with LTTS for 16 years now. Her team is responsible for Verification and Validation in the Transportation domain. Her multidisciplinary team spanning across SW and System testing for EV, AV and Body domains, help enhance product quality by uncovering issues at the early stages of product development.

"One of my favorite moments in my career has to be when our Business Unit head drove the car in which we had fitted an EPS (Electronic Power Steering) designed and developed by us. It was a brief 15-minute drive but the experience of a lifetime for us.", she exclaimed when asked about her favorite moment at LTTS.?

What you read are just a few from the thousands of stories about how Women Engineers at LTTS are #EngineeringTheChange and helping create a better tomorrow, for everyone.?

On this International Women in Engineering Day, we express our gratitude for the fantastic work women engineers are doing across the world to make this world a better place every day. Wishing all the women engineers a very happy Women in Engineering Day. Keep innovating, and keep on Engineering The Change.?