Women in Mechanical Engineering

This book features influential scholarly research and technical contributions, professional trajectories, disciplinary shifts, personal insights, and a combination of these from a group of remarkable women within mechanical engineering. Combined, these chapters tell an important story about the dynamic field of mechanical engineering in the areas of energy and the environment, as seen from the perspective of some of its most extraordinary women scientists and engineers. The volume shares with the Women in Engineering and Science Series the primary aim of documenting and raising awareness of the valuable, multi-faceted contributions of women engineers and scientists, past and present, to these areas. Women in mechanical engineering and energy and the environment are historically relevant and continue to lead these fields as passionate risk takers, entrepreneurs, innovators, educators, and researchers. Chapter authors are members of the National Academies, winners of major awards and recognition that include Presidential Medals, as well as SWE, SAE, ASME, ASEE and IEEE Award winners and Fellows. 

Professor Margaret Bailey, Ph.D., P.E. is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering within the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, Rochester Institute of Technology. Appointments at RIT include the Founding Director of AdvanceRIT Program (2012-2020), the Co-Chair of the President’s Commission on Women (2007-2020), the inaugural Sr. Faculty Associate to the Provost for Women Faculty (2010 –2018), the Founding Director of WE@RIT (2004-2011) and the inaugural Kate Gleason Endowed Chair (2003-2009). Dr. Bailey teaches courses and conducts research related to Thermodynamics, engineering and public policy, engineering education, and gender in engineering and science. Professor Bailey serves as the Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI on several NSF funded efforts, including the RIT ADVANCE Institutional Transformation (IT) grant (2012-2019, PI), the ADVANCE IT-Catalyst grant (2008-2011, PI), the ADVANCE Partnership grant focused on faculty salary equity practices and study (2021-2026, co-PI), and a PFE:RIEF grant focused on "Understanding the Relationships between Gender, Self-Efficacy, and Extracurricular Activities in the Professional Formation of Engineers" (2021-2023, co-PI). The projects that she has led have resulted in impactful new programs, practices, and policies as well as a dedicated ADVANCE unit within the Office of the Provost and the women in engineering center, WE@RIT, within the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, both of which have been nationally recognized. In 2008, WE@RIT received the WEPAN Women in Engineering Program Award in recognition of the program’s offerings and impact for diversifying engineering. More recently, in August 2021, RIT was one of ten US universities awarded the National Institute of Health (NIH) Prize for Enhancing Faculty Gender Diversity in Biomedical and Behavioral Science, which is in large part due to the impact of the RIT ADVANCE program. Dr. Bailey is also a recipient of the national Maria Mitchell Women inScience Award, the RIT Edwina Award for Gender Diversity and Inclusiveness, and the RIT Isaac L. Jordan Sr. Faculty Pluralism Award. Dr. Bailey is the co-author on an engineering textbook published through Wiley, Fundamentals of Engineering Thermodynamics, which is used worldwide in over 250 institutions. She also co-edited Women in Mechanical Engineering - Energy and the Environment published by Springer Nature in 2022. Dr. Bailey is an author on over 85 peer-reviewed publications and a registered professional engineer in the state of NJ.


Associate Professor Laura Shackelford, Ph.D. is the Founding Director of the Center for Engaged Storycraft, recent Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, and Professor in the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY, USA. Dr. Shackelford teaches courses and conducts research in contemporary fiction and narrative theory, digital literature, speculative and science fiction, women’s and gender studies, and feminist philosophy of science, and leads an interdisciplinary, project based, travel-enhanced Transnational Digital Creation Workshop with faculty at the University of Paris-8. She is the author of Tactics of the Human: Experimental Technics in American Fiction, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2014; co-editor of Surreal Entanglements: Essays on Jeff VanderMeer’s Fiction, published by Routledge Press in 2021; and co-editor of Women in Mechanical Engineering – Energy and Environment, published by Springer Nature in 2022. In addition, she has numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters in prominent edited collections exploring the scientific, technological, philosophical, and cultural transformations that have grown out of post-World War II cybernetics, information, and bioinformatic sciences and cultures, and their impact on narrative practices, gender roles, and spatial relations, in particular. She is also a longstanding member of the interdisciplinary Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA). Her sponsored research activity has enabled her to co-design and facilitate story-driven engineering workshops with her KEEN Engineering Unleashed collaborators in recent years and to lead a summer workshop, Gathering Stories: A Digital Storytelling Workshop for Young Women for local 11th and 12th graders in the Rochester area since July 2021. In November 2021, she will join the University of Paris-8 as an Invited Professor, where she will continue to research divergent American and French histories of interactive narrative and their potential significance to interactive models for health communication and narrative medicine today.