Helen and John C. Hartmann Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

For Dina Ayman’s parents, the road to medical school beckoned enticingly to their gifted daughter, a driven student with a love for math and science. The profession, they argued, would eagerly welcome a woman of her talents. But Ayman ’18, M.S. ’18, did not hear that call. And she resisted. “From the seventh grade, my dream was to become an engineer, because I enjoyed studying math and physics and that’s what engineering meant to me,” she recalls, adding that she kept the dream alive despite her parents’ concerns that “engineering is not a field for girls and that the world might not allow...