IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - December 2019 - 56

Women in Engineering

by Ashok Bindra

Role of Mentors in
Dr. Tanya Gachovska's Journey
From Bulgaria to Canada

he IEEE Power Electronics
Society (PELS) is continuing
its tradition of inviting a guest
speaker to the Women in Engineering
(WIE) breakfast reception at major
PELS-sponsored technical conferences to enhance networking among
women engineers, scientists, and faculty around the world. This year, PELS
invited Dr. Tanya Kirilova Gachovska
of Solantro Semiconductor, Ontario,
Canada, to share her career experiences, both achievements and struggles, at the 2019 IEEE Energy Convergence Congress and Exposition
(ECCE 2019) in Baltimore, Maryland,
on 1 October. She was introduced to
the audience by PELS WIE Chair Prof.
Katherine Kim of Taiwan University.
Before inviting Dr. Gachovska to give
her talk, Prof. Kim presented some
statistics on the women engineers
who are PELS members. According to
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2019.2947768
Date of current version: 17 December 2019

a survey conducted by PELS, there are
79 IEEE PELS women members,
which includes 29 IEEE Student Members, 29 Members, 18 Senior Members,
one Fellow, one Life Fellow, and one
with no response. Only a small percentage is currently involved with
PELS as volunteers, but the interest to
serve on PELS technical committees
and volunteer for other services is
growing rapidly.
Before handing the microphone to
the guest speaker, Prof. Kim encouraged the audience to network via the
Facebook Group "WIE for ECCE" and
consider nominating a woman engineer for a PELS award (https://www
.ieee-pels.org/awards). Those interested in becoming involved in the WIE
committee or other activities can
contact her at katherine.kim@ieee
.org. There were more than 50 attendees at this event.
Prior to starting her presentation,
"Role of Mentors in My Career Path
From Bulgaria to Canada," Dr. Gacho-

vska expressed her gratitude to PELS
for inviting her to give a talk at the
event. She also thanked the attendees
for coming to listen to her (Figure 1).
Dr. Gachovska commended PELS for
giving travel grants to selected women
engineers. She recalled the first WIE
breakfast at ECCE 2009 when fewer
than seven women were present in the
audience. In 2019, there were approximately 35 women engineers in attendance (Figure 2).
D r. G a c h o v s k a r e c e i v e d h e r
M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University
of Ruse, Bulgaria, in 1990 and 2003,
respectively. She earned her second
Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in power
electronics from the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in 2012.
Her thesis was "Modeling of Power
Semiconductor Devices." Currently,
she works as a senior verification engineer for Solantro Semiconductor in
Ottawa, Canada.

FIG 1 Dr. Tanya Gachovska giving a talk at the WIE breakfast event at ECCE 2019. (Source: ECCE 2019.)

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

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IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - December 2019

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