IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016 - 61

Shehadeh-Grant (right) judges entries at the IEEE Robot Challenge 2015 event.

was not affordable, so her father suggested she pursue engineering because
it was a profession where she could find
a job and live her love of science.
She earned her B.S. degree in electrical engineering and enjoyed working
with generators, motors, and transmission lines enough to pursue her Ph.D.
degree in power engineering. She was
accepted at Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute and The George Washington
University, but her conservative parents
did not allow her to travel anywhere to
go to school.
"Girls from Eastern societies do not
leave home," Shehadeh-Grant says.
"Middle Eastern cultures are different
from American and Western cultures
that have more freedom in choosing and
moving around. I didn't have that luxury. It would have been scandalous to be
on my own. There were lots of compromises, but all went well."
She found a professor who had a
grant for optical networking research
at The City College of NY (CCNY), which
was local, and she went there for her
Ph.D. program. She took night classes at
CCNY and researched optical designs for
wavelength-division multiplexing transmission systems at Bellcore. She earned
her master's and Ph.D. degrees in a very
intense 3.5 years with no breaks or student life, and she says she has no regrets.

Along Her Path
When her advisor asked her what she
thought about being the only woman
on the team working on the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agen-

Cisco as a presales engineer but says
that didn't work out.
She then found her dream job as a
product manager at Abovenet, which
married both technical and business skills. "I felt comfortable and
was shining in the role. But then the
company was acquired, and then I got
sick," she says.
One day in 2011, Shehadeh-Grant
woke up unable to use her legs. She
was diagnosed with transverse myelitis, a neurological disorder that had no
symptoms that show up beforehand. She
was hospitalized for two months before
returning home, and it took two years
in physical therapy to get her life back
on track.
Now she can walk with a walker and
drives a car that has been adapted with
hand controls. She says she feels "quasiindependent." "Driving feels different
when you don't use both your hands
and feet at the same time," ShehadehGrant explains. "With hands only, the
safety factor is much bigger. I can't take
my hands off the controls at any time.
Drives longer than an hour and a half
are painful. My hands feel stiff if I don't
get out and move around."

cy project, she said that she thinks
of herself only as a person. "When
you think of your merit by gender,
some men get jealous or angry and
think that you got wherever you are
because you are a woman," ShehadehGrant explains. "I don't want to prove
anything. I just work hard over and
over, and I don't accept the affirmative action label for any achievement
I make."
In her first job at Lucent in hardware
integration on optical transmission systems, she found it hard to survive as a
woman and felt she had to prove herself
there. "I would suggest solutions others hadn't thought of, and they would
have to ask someone else to confirm
the solution," she recalls. "It took
a year to get it through that I am a
competent, confident expert."
Shehadeh-Grant was on a promotion track at Lucent and stayed for
five years. She was interested in staying in the lab and developing technical skills but wanted to be part of the
decision-making and strategy side
of business. She felt ambitious for
pursuing an M.B.A. degree, and the
optical networking group there sponsored her education.
She left Lucent and went to
Colombia Business School and then
was bitten by the startup fever. As
a result, she joined a few telecom
startup companies. "In 2003, the
market was sad for M.B.A.s, and
few telecom startups survived. The
Shehadeh-Grant's first handcycling
timing wasn't right," she explains.
marathon after her diagnosis of transverse
Shehadeh-Grant worked briefly at
myelitis.

december 2016

IEEE womEn In EngInEErIng magazInE

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Women in Engineering Magazine - December 2016