Celebrating Women in Engineering: 75 Years of Innovation and Advocacy Pamphlet [PDF]

The short biographies in this booklet celebrate the lives and legacies of twenty prominent women in STEM. They accompany a set of busts sculpted by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya and normally on display in the engineering section of The Cooper Union’s academic building at 41 Cooper Square. For the 75th Anniversary celebration of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) on May 6th, 2025, the busts were put on public display outside the Great Hall. 

In 1950, a group of sixty-one women—all of them attending or having graduated from engineering schools—convened for a weekend in late May amid the leafy hills of Ringwood, New Jersey. The gathering marked the first unified national SWE meeting, held at what was then The Cooper Union’s country retreat, known as Green Camp. From that inaugural gathering of young women, representing twenty different engineering schools, SWE has grown to 47,000 members across the United States and internationally. For the past 75 years, Cooper’s ties to the organization have remained close. 

Today, SWE is the largest and most active student group in the Albert Nerken School of Engineering. That enthusiasm is a part of a wider Cooper Union legacy of coeducation and advocacy, dating back to early Great Hall rallies for women’s suffrage. More immediately, it is fueled by efforts within the school to promote an equitable and inclusive academic culture. Thanks to a devoted network of faculty mentors, fellow students, and alumnae role models, young women at Cooper are blazing paths forward in disciplines where women remain underrepresented nationally. 

Many thanks to the Cooper Union Director of STEM Outreach, Yvonne Thevenot, for organizing the bio sketch project and to Sydnie Ampofo, a first-year chemical engineering major and to Lalitha Rao, a first-year mechanical engineering major, for researching and writing about these amazing women.