IET India Confers Naga Vara Aparna Akula Young Women Engineer Award 2021

Bangalore, India - The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) named Naga Vara Aparna Akula, Principal Scientist, CSIR-CSIO, the Young Women Engineer of 2021 as part of the first IET India Awards 2021. She has made major contributions to the design, development, and deployment of intelligent sensing and alarm systems based on infrared imaging and seismic sensing. Her novel target detection and recognition approaches have resulted in successful implementations as well as various academic publications and patents. Her work has also found application in wildlife monitoring, border-security intelligence, and radiometric image analysis software for the defence sector, as well as an Earthquake warning system (EqWS) for the Delhi Metro, garnering national attention from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the Wildlife Institute of India.

Sukla Chandra, Senior Managing Director, GE Licensing Inclusion & Diversity Leader, GE South Asia; Madhura DasGupta Sinha, Founder & CEO, Aspire For Her; Arnab Thakur, India Director of Strategy and Growth, Prosus Fintech; and Anandi Iyer, Director & Head, Fraunhofer India, judged the IET India Young Woman Engineer Award. The IET India Awards 2021 were divided into seven categories, with entries accepted from industry, academia, and not-for-profit organizations.

The IET India Young Woman Engineer Award seeks to highlight and celebrate young women engineers in India under the age of 35 who have made a positive impact on the Indian engineering ecosystem and have the ability and influence to advance the engineering discipline in academic, corporate, and research and development settings. The felicitation was done by Professor Danielle George, previous president of the IET and the IET’s second female president in 150 years.

With increasing attention being directed to India’s potential to become the world’s next technology innovation hub, the past years have seen extraordinary accomplishments and successes by home-grown companies and individuals that have helped to significantly contribute to national progress. The IET India Awards, as part of the IET’s 150-year celebrations, aim to highlight this growth and recognize the individuals who have contributed to it. It also hopes that by doing so, it will motivate India’s vast and rapidly increasing engineering talent to use emerging technology to solve global problems.

Today, India has established itself on the global technology map, and this journey is on a rapid upward trend, as we see increased interest in India as a strategic engineering hub from global firms and investors. Shekhar Sanyal, Country Head & Director, IET India, said, “The best way to celebrate our 150 years is to recognize the country’s change-agents, difference-makers, and engineering champions who have truly transformed the scope of technology and used it to solve some of India’s most pressing problems. We hope that the IET India awards serve to inspire even more people to channel this exciting age of innovation and new technologies towards creative solutions that create widespread impact not just in India, but globally.”

To this end, Ujani Ghosh, Thought Leadership & Policy, IET India, added, “The #WomenInTech revolution has reached new heights in India, and we look forward to felicitating young women engineers like Ms Akula, who have the potential to contribute tremendously to the nation’s development through engineering innovation. We hope that this first edition inspires young women engineers across the country and encourages even more women engineers to apply to the IET India Awards such that we can impact gender diversity in the engineering space.”

Image Source: IET India

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