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Woman Engineer Magazine, launched in 1979, is a career-guidance and recruitment magazine offered at no charge to qualified women engineering, computer science and information technology students & professionals seeking employment and advancement opportunities in their careers.

This magazine reaches students and professional women engineers nationwide at their home addresses, colleges and universities, and chapters of student and professional organizations.

If you are a woman engineering student or professional, Woman Engineer is available to you FREE!


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 A BRIGHT OUTLOOK FOR BIOTECH & BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERS

Sandra H. Shichtman
 
IN 2012, THERE WERE 11,367 BIOTECH FIRMS IN THE U.S. DOING PRODUCTION AND/OR RESEARCH& DEVELOPMENT, EMPLOYING BIOTECH ENGINEERS. TWO YEARS LATER, THE U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS SAYS THERE WERE 22,100 BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERS.
 
BIOMED ENGINEERS COMBINE ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES WITH MEDICAL AND BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES TO DESIGN AND CREATE EQUIPMENT, DEVICES, COMPUTER SYSTEMS AND SOFTWARE USED IN HEALTHCARE. THE OUTLOOK FOR BIOMED ENGINEERS IS FOR A 23 PERCENT RISE IN EMPLOYMENT IN THE DECADE BETWEEN 2014 AND 2024.
 
KATIE SHANNON, BIOGEN
 
When someone in Katie Shannon’s network, who worked at Biogen, described the company “as a fast-paced, dynamic environment where you have a lot of opportunities to learn and develop in your career,” Shannon liked the description. And when some colleagues described Biogen’s culture “as a high-performing environment, where people appreciate having fun while at work,” Shannon felt that Biogen had retained a small biotech company feel. All this was appealing to Shannon, so she relocated to Massachusetts and came aboard at Biogen in December 2009.
 
As a chemical engineering student at Lehigh University, she did two internships with a biotech company, which taught her how she could apply engineering to biotech. She earned her degree in 2002, began an online MS degree program from the University of Wisconsin/Madison in 2008, and, with one semester left before getting her engineering management degree, she came to Biogen as a process engineer with Biogen’s upstream engineering team. She graduated in 2010.
 
In her initial position, her team focused on the cell-culture part of the production process. “I worked on new product introductions into our facility and ongoing process improvement,” she explains. She was promoted in that role and then became manager of that team. About a year and a half ago, she says, she moved out of that department into her current role as senior manager, automation, Biogen.
 
In this position, she manages the automation engineering function for Biogen’s manufacturing operation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “My team is responsible for all the process control systems used in production as well as many of the related systems.” One of the core parts of the job is to meet all the requirements of Biogen’s internal quality systems and all its external regulatory requirements to insure the safety and efficacy of Biogen’s products.
 
Additionally, in 2016, she’s part of a program team working to design Biogen’s next-generation operations strategy, which will be incorporated as part of a new manufacturing facility in Switzerland and integrated across Biogen’s existing manufacturing network over the next four years. “So, I went from the equipment side to the software side,” Shannon says, who notes that job mobility is encouraged at Biogen. She is also working with a cross-functional team and a few senior leaders to attract, develop and advance more Biogen women in STEM careers.
 
She received the following good advice, which she shares with younger engineers: “Start with the end of your career in mind; have a vision of where you may want to end up at the end of your career. With that perspective, chart a path, and note the types of skills and experiences you would need to help you get there.”
 
Shannon also advises that it’s important to identify female role models within engineering who might be on a similar career path. Also, she adds, establish and maintain a network of relationships—in college or early in your career— since the biotech community is a small, tight-knit one where many people know each other. Biogen has an employee resource network—open to all employees—called the Women’s Innovation Network that holds events so women across the company can come together to share experiences and network.
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