Advisory Board | SEAS Center for Women in Engineering

External Members

Mary Brigden

Head of NAUTO, located in Palo Alto, CA, Mary is a graduate of the US Naval Academy and holds a masters' degree from The George Washington University.

Gene Colabatistto

Gene Colabatistto is group president of CAE’s Defence & Security Group. He has more than 25 years experience in the global defense industry, and has held leadership positions in both the military and the private sector. Before joining CAE, he was a senior vice president in the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Group at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a leading provider of scientific, engineering, systems integration and technical services. Mr. Colabatistto received his MS in electrical engineering from GW.

Barbara Fleming

Barbara Fleming has more than 30 years of experience in Department of Defense (DoD) information technology. She recently retired as senior cybersecurity policy advisor for the DoD Chief Information Officer, where she helped shape the Department’s future direction in cyber defense. Earlier assignments with the Defense Information Systems Agency ranged from hands-on development of combat support systems to managing the acquisition of a large portfolio of cybersecurity capabilities. Ms. Fleming has a BS in applied mathematics and an MS in computer science from GW. She has been serving on the SEAS National Advisory Council since 2016 and was a member of the 2018 Women in Engineering Task Force that investigated best practices at top engineering schools.

Elma Levy

Elma Levy is the co-founder and chair of the Board of Dovel Technologies. She established the corporate foundation and culture that enabled the company to develop from a two-person, at-home start-up to a mature company of $200M and 1300 FTEs. Ms. Levy had the vision to implement a strategy of growth through acquisition at the right time in the corporate life cycle and executed the steps to realize that vision. In her current position as chair of the board, Ms. Levy oversees and guides the organizational governance and strategic direction. She is a member of the SEAS National Advisory Council.

Cathy Mavriplis

Catherine Mavriplis is a professor of mechanical engineering at University of Ottawa. Her specialty is numerical methods for aerodynamics simulations. Dr. Mavriplis also has held the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering since 2011, a program that aims to recruit, retain and advance women to leadership. She has been awarded the Elsie MacGill Northern Lights Award for Education.

Dr. Mavriplis holds a BS in mechanical engineering from McGill, and an MS and PhD in aeronautics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After a postdoctoral stay at Princeton, she became professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at GW. She also worked at the US National Science Foundation, NASA Langley, and University of Oklahoma before returning to Canada. Dr. Mavriplis has been president of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Society of Canada and a councilor of the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute.

Vivian Pinn

Vivian Pinn, MD, is retired from the Office of Research on Women's Health (ORWH). In her role as director of ORWH, she was in a unique position to help ensure that women's health issues and women are well represented in NIH research efforts. In many ways, her role was the culmination of a lifelong focus on medicine and advocacy for access to good health care for everyone. Prior to working at NIH, Dr. Pinn was professor and chair of the Department of Pathology at Howard University. She previously held teaching appointments at Tufts University and Harvard Medical School. At Tufts she was assistant dean for student affairs and an advocate for minority students.

Taly Walsh

Taly Walsh served as Assistant Director in support of the SEAS Center for Women in Engineering from the Center's inception to January 2022. Taly is a creative, strategic business leader who previously held positions as Vice President of Marketing and Events at the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA); Senior Vice President of Membership and Marketing at InfoComm International (the trade organization for the audiovisual industry); Director of Communications with Thomson Financial leading marketing for a biometrics conference; and Director of Communications for Public Technology, Inc., a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing technology R&D in state and local governments. Taly enjoys painting, hiking, yoga, learning and reading. She has twin sons and lives with her husband in the Washington, DC area.

Tenisha "Ava" Williams

Tenisha “Ava” Williams (she/her) is an experienced diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant, speaker, and facilitator at Solution Consulting Co. with over a decade of experience with organizational strategic planning and equity-centered change management. Ava has led project teams focusing on identifying and addressing inequities for various leaders and executives at over 100 organizations. She’s known for introducing frameworks and tools beyond conventional DEI discussions - urging audiences to imagine how their work can build an organizational culture that strives for belonging for all and deliver tangible and measurable outcomes for communities affected by structural inequities.

Yucheng Zhou

Yucheng is a director of consulting services at CGI Inc. She graduated from the George Washington University with a Master of Science in Computer Graphics and Multimedia in 2000. Since then, Yucheng has worked in vast areas in the IT field and is skilled in software development, COTS implementation, cybersecurity, cloud migration and enterprise architecture. In her spare time, Yucheng is passionate about and happily engaged in advocating for women’s selection of STEM subjects and pursuance of STEM careers.

Internal Members

Chair: Mona Zaghloul

Dr. Mona Zaghloul is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is the director of GW’s Institute of MEMS and VLSI Technologies. She conducts research in: digital and analog design of VLSI circuits, VLSI systems applications, and the design and implementation of micro/nano-sensors using micro and nano technology. Examples of the devices on which her team works are: chemical gas sensors, biosensors, and RF-MEMS. Her research group works in collaboration with local and national laboratories and with industry.

Matthew Kay

Dr. Matthew Kay is a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. His laboratory studies cardiac electrical activity and mitochondrial function during normal and disease conditions. Work is primarily focused on understanding how hypoxia, ischemia, and heart failure alter myocardial energy supply and demand and identifying how that may motivate deadly arrhythmias.

Kim Roddis

Dr. Kim Roddis is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. A registered professional engineer, Professor Roddis has experience in heavy industrial and general commercial building design, as well as in bridge design. She is a structural engineer with varied teaching and research interests that include: design, fabrication, and construction processes; structural applications of artificial intelligence and computer-aided design; web-enhanced teaching; fatigue and fracture in bridges; frame stability; and seismic steel connections.

Timothy Wood

Dr. Timothy Wood is a professor in the Department of Computer Science. Professor Wood's research studies how cloud computing platforms can be built from massive data centers containing thousands of servers and storage devices. He seeks to improve the performance, reliability, and energy efficiency of these large distributed systems by adding automation and intelligence at the operating system and virtualization layers.

Shahrokh Ahmadi

Dr. Shahrokh Ahmadi is a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in low power and low noise microelectronics systems, sensors, and systems on chips. He is active in developing low power, and low noise VLSI devices such as ADCs, Sigma Delta converters, and active inductors. Professor Ahmadi is also active in applications of RFID and SAW sensors in automation and sensor networks.

Erica Gralla

Dr. Erica Gralla is a professor in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering. She studies operations and supply chain management in disaster response and other urgent or uncertain environments. Her research seeks to combine the strengths of human intuition and mathematical models to create better decision-making approaches. Current projects include transportation planning models for aid delivery, innovative ways to collect and analyze data to support emergency response decision-making, strategies to support better decision-making in design and product development, and human intuition for managing uncertainty.

Megan Leftwich

Dr. Megan Leftwich is a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Her Biologically Inspired Energy Laboratory investigates natural fluid dynamics phenomena and applies their findings to engineering problems. Current projects include the wake dynamics of vertical axis wind turbines in standard and complex configurations, the hydrodynamics of pinniped swimming (in collaboration with the Smithsonian National Zoo), and the fluid dynamics of human birth.

Jonathan Ragone

Jonathan Ragone is the director of undergraduate student services, advising, and records for SEAS. During his career, Jonathan has worked in both student and academic affairs, while holding a variety of positions as a residence hall director, assistant director for college housing, academic coordinator for the graduate program in public health, and associate director for undergraduate colleges.

Graduate Students

Natalia Clementi

Natalia is an international graduate student from Argentina, and a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. She conducts research on computational nanoplasmonics for biosensing applications. She is an advocate of open source software, a Python preacher, a feminist, and an advocate of gender equality.

Mojolaoluwa (Demi) Ladipo-Obasa

Mojolaoluwa is a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in environmental engineering. She received her B.S. degree in civil engineering from GW in 2017.

Bengisu ŞİŞİK

Bengisu ŞİŞİK is a PhD student from Turkey. She studies at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department of the George Washington University. Previously, she received her master’s degree from the same department with an Energy Engineering and Management graduate certificate in 2020. Her research focuses on additive manufacturing of thermoelectric materials. She is also a SEAS Graduate Ambassador and promotes graduate student community at the School of Engineering & Applied Science.

Thanks to Previous Board Members!