Diane Magrane
Director of Executive Leadership Programs

ELAM has a sister on the way and her name is ELATE. The name was chosen carefully to carry enthusiasm for leadership wherever she goes. ELATE stands for Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering trademarked as ELATE at Drexel®. Modeled after ELAM's successful program for medicine, dentistry, and public health, ELATE will engage senior women faculty in engineering, computer science and other high tech fields in a year-long fellowship. ELATE fellows will enhance their competencies in organizational change, strategic finance, and personal leadership effectiveness through three on-site sessions of classroom and consultation,  conference calls and collaborative work with learning communities, interviews with university and college leaders, and institutional action projects mentored by their Deans and Provosts. Similar to the selection of ELAM's inaugural class of 25 fellows, we will begin small and build over the years of the program. Only 24 will be accepted into the first class, to be announced in the spring of 2012 and initiated with the first session in August 2012 in Philadelphia.

As ELAM fellows, we have enjoyed the privilege of reaching out to each other in times of celebration and need. Our community is so extensive and inclusive that it is easy to find a colleague to explore a new job opportunity or a new faculty partner, to find someone who has experience in a new interest or who has harnessed a challenge that seems insurmountable. Our colleagues in the high tech fields rarely have these experiences.

Ask a woman in academic engineering, especially electrical or mechanical engineering, about her education and listen to her story. Most likely you will hear of a very smart girl who liked to take things apart as a child, who was really good at math and science and who managed to convert her self-labeled "nerdiness" into brilliance later in life. She applies what she knows about technology and systems to "make better mousetraps"—clothing that keeps us warm in the cold rain, vests that protect soldiers from chest injury in the field, GPS that guides us to our destination without having to open a paper map in the car, and hip joints that keep us climbing mountains. You also likely will hear a story of a young woman who was the only female in her classroom during undergraduate and graduate school, and quite likely is the only full professor in her department. In the course of her professional education she may never have had a woman teacher, role model, or mentor. In fact, many report having no useful mentoring at all! The senior women faculty in our universities and colleges of engineering, computer science and biomedical engineering are smart, resilient women poised for leadership and in need of a community such as we have experienced with ELAM. ELATE intends to provide that.

In preparing to design and open this new program, Katie Gleason, Assistant Director of ELATE (many of you may know her through her skillful role in ELAM's program evaluation) and I conducted more than 30 interviews with leaders from high tech fields across the United States and Canada. Most come from academic environments and range from mid-level faculty to department chairs and chancellors; 65% were women, and a handful came from corporations and associations. We gained insight into a culture of pragmatic problem-solvers who light up with challenges that might have technical or systems solutions.

Those in academics are firmly embedded in the higher education world of tenure and teaching. Their concerns about the future focus on a wide range of issues including recruiting diverse students to the high tech fields, sustaining natural resources, reducing the burdens of illness and disability, and improving the safety of our airways and roadways through technical solutions. As with women leaders in other professions, those in executive positions often took circuitous pathways to their current roles, taking advantage of opportunities and making the best of their challenges at work and at home. They have learned on their own how to leverage their credibility as scholars into opportunity as institutional leaders; and, unless they developed their careers in industry, few have had formal leadership development. In contrast to the lack of mentoring reported in the literature and experience of many women faculty, many of these leaders reported having supportive mentors and several worked with executive coaches.

Women Doctoral Scientists at 4-year educational institutions

You can help. You may recall the Madeleine Albright quote, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." It appears in an interview for the Wall Street Journal and graced the side of a Starbucks cup for a while. I'd like to offer a twist on that – "There's a special kind of heaven on earth, one of grateful collegiality, for women who support other women" — and invite you to seek out the women in engineering and computer science on your campus. Invite them for a cup of coffee and let them know what you learned from ELAM. If you have a group of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) women on your campus, ask if you and your ELUM colleagues might share your ELAM experiences. Many of you gather for dinners and teas—consider inviting your technical colleagues to this opportunity.

ELAM has a sister on the way and she needs the welcoming support of the full ELAM community. Share your experiences with your high tech colleagues. Let them know this wonderful opportunity is now available to them and encourage them to discuss their interest with the Chairs, Deans, and Provost. Let us know what questions arise. Join us in extending this community of professional women to advance our goals to enhance diversity in academics, to enrich our community of academic leaders, and to bridge from our academic health centers to our universities. As I sit typing this column on a laptop that is now less than one-thousandth the size of the first ENIAC computer, I am appreciative of the army of women known as the first "computers," who programmed the first automated complex calculators that led to my ability to complete this column in the seat of an airplane. We can only imagine how much this effort to advance our high tech sisters in academia through ELATE participation will benefit all of us in the health sciences.