Now in its sixth year, the 2021 WE50 celebrates the wealth of female talent within engineering and related disciplines. The annual celebration is aligned with International Women in Engineering Day (INWED) which takes place on 23 June.
Some of Kar-Narayan’s happiest childhood memories involved taking apart cassette players and VCR recorders, and that curiosity is what drew her to her current role. Her research involves developing new polymeric materials for harvesting energy to power health monitoring devices and integrating materials into versatile sensors. She has also been working on developing self-powered devices for patients.
“I am absolutely thrilled by this award, and to be recognised as an ‘Engineering Hero’ will go down well with my kids,” said Kar-Narayan, who is a Fellow of Clare Hall. “My late father was diabetic and suffered from heart disease, and this played a role in my desire to use science and engineering to improve patient care by developing self-powered devices that can offer personalised healthcare and remote health monitoring, and new technologies to study and manage the progression of disease at a cellular level. I am so grateful to WES for this award, and of course, to all the people who have supported me over the years, including my brilliant research group without whom this would not have been possible.”
One of the aims of Kar-Narayan’s research is the development of early-stage prototypes and eventual commercialisation of energy harvesting and self-powered sensing technologies.
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge