First Female Graduate from ISLI
Reporting on such stories is difficult as the first female graduate in this industry should not be news. It is an indictment on the industry and the education system that this is cause for news. Despite this it is a wonderful achievement in a male dominated space.
As the first female student to enroll for the EngD programme at the Institute for System Level Integration in 2001, EngD Research Engineer, Jasmine Lam, will also become the ISLI's first female EngD graduate following a graduation ceremony at Glasgow University in July. Sponsored by QinetiQ, Jasmine's project, entitled High-level design tools for FPGA SoC, focused on developing a design methodology to make FPGAs accessible as an implementation platform for algorithm engineers working at a very high level of abstraction e.g. directly from Matlab through to FPGA implementation. The prime application domains will be wireless communications and multimedia but the project will also investigate the application of these methods to other areas such as radar, sonar and medical image and signal processing.
Jasmine's viva voce exam, the final ‘defence' of her doctoral thesis in front of a panel of academic and industry specialists, took place in May. The panel was convened by Prof David Cumming, University of Glasgow. The examiners were Dr Emmanueal Casseau of the French Institute Laboratoire d'Electronique des Systèmes TEmps Réel (LESTER) in Brittany, Prof Donald Reay of Heriot-Watt University's Electronic Engineering Department and Andrew Parmley, Head of Discipline at Thales Optronics, Glasgow. Having successfully defended her thesis, the panel agreed that Jasmine should pass the viva without having to make any changes to her research work. This is extremely rare among EngD and other PhD-level theses. Normally, EngD students pass the viva exam subject to changes to their research findings that will satisfy the panel of examiners.
Jasmine's viva pass creates a double first – she is the first woman to graduate with the Engineering Doctorate in System Level Integration and also the first student, since the EngD programme launched in 1999, to pass her viva without having to make a single change to her research work.
