Engineering honour for Irishwoman

A UCD electronic engineer has become the first Irishwoman to receive the accolade of Fellow of the international body, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

AN IRISH engineer has won a major international distinction, election as a Fellow of the leading engineering body the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). She becomes the first Irishwoman to become a Fellow and one of only a handful of engineers here to have received this important accolade.

Prof Orla Feely’s selection was announced last Thursday and her elevation as a Fellow of the IEEE takes effect from next year.

An associate professor in University College Dublin’s school of electrical, electronic and mechanical engineering, she expressed delight earlier this week on her selection. “It is an enormous honour,” she says. “It is a recognition of my work going back over two decades.”

It is also an indication of how far Ireland had come in terms of international recognition for the high standard of engineering research here, she believes.

Twenty years ago Ireland had one IEEE Fellow, UCD’s Prof Sean Scanlan, but now there are nine or 10 including five at UCD. “It is an appropriate recognition of how Ireland has advanced in engineering research,” Prof Feely says. Having five Fellows also allows UCD to rank as one of the leading world centres for research in this discipline, she adds.

Selection as a Fellow only comes after a person has made a considerable contribution to the field and it recognises “unusual distinction in the profession”, according to the IEEE. One must have “an extraordinary record of accomplishments” before election as a Fellow.

“I am the first Irishwoman to get this award,” she said, but the number of women Fellows remained very low at just 2.5 per cent of the total.

“We are looking at a historical problem,” she says, given the relatively low number of women pursuing electronic and electrical engineering at university. About a quarter of the current intake are women but when she did her degree in the 1980s just one in 10 were women.

Gender clearly is no issue when conducting research, given Prof Feely has won not one but two principal investigator grants from Science Foundation Ireland in support of her research work. It focuses on the theory behind the electronic circuits used in day-to-day applications such as mobile phones, CD players and televisions.

MORE SPECIFICALLY SHE describes her research as involving “non-linear discrete-time circuits and systems”.

Many circuits contain a mixture of digital and analogue signalling and processing. This usually means a circuit will switch back and forth between the two forms, so there will be digital to analogue and analogue to digital converters.

The telephone for example relies on converters to change your voice, an analogue signal, into a digital form for transmission through the phone network, only to be converted back from digital to analogue at the other end.

Joining these systems in a single circuit can cause “unusual” distortions to the signal however and Prof Feely uses theoretical analysis to devise improved circuits to remove these distortions. “My work is in the theory of these systems, but it is always with an eye to the applications,” she says.

Another research area is the theoretical designs of “Mems”, micro electro mechanical systems. This involves integrating the electronics typically found on a silicon microchip with a mechanical device that is also built into the silicon.

This is a “hot topic” at the moment, with Mems being used in advanced sensors, she says. The mechanical element is able to respond to its external environment, moving in a particular way because of the environment it encounters.

Its movement provides information to the electronic circuits, which are then able to process the inputs to achieve some output. The mechanical component can be very small and is typically just a millionth of a metre across, she says.

She also finds that her theoretical work is now seeing application in biological systems. Biological networks can often look much like an electronic circuit. “When you get a good general theory it can apply across a range of applications,” she says.

She views the support of SFI as crucial to the development of Ireland’s knowledge economy. Engineering research is vital to this process given it feeds into innovation. “The involvement of SFI has been critical for developing world class research,” she believes.