Want to Grow the Next Generation of Engineers? Dr. Cathy Liu Shows the Way

How do we help cultivate and excite the next generation of engineers? Dr. Cathy Liu, the DesignCon 2021 Engineer of the Year, knows at least one way.

She has decided to donate the entire $1000 grant, which she receives as part of the award, to the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at UC Davis “to help young engineering students to grow.”

Liu is a Distinguished Engineer and Director with Broadcom’s SerDes Architecture and Modeling Group. She has been a long-time participant at DesignCon and was voted to be DesignCon 2021 Engineer of the Year by her peers from among three other excellent finalists. From a larger pool of nominees, the DesignCon judges chose the finalists based on their outstanding dedication to high-quality engineering and new product advancements at the chip, board, or system level, with a special emphasis on signal integrity and power integrity.

In addition to the sessions listed in the finalist article, Liu has since joined the panel, “Interoperable Common Electrical Interfaces (CEI) & Channel Standards Update: An OIF Perspective” organized with the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF).

She will also be available in the Career Zone on Wednesday, August 18, 12:30-1:45 pm, along with other Technical Program Committee (TPC) co-chairpersons, to answer questions regarding submitting a paper for DesignCon 2022 and provide advice on best practices.

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Liu works to encourage engineers to take a more active part in the engineering community. She was among a group of TPC members mentoring new authors and early-career engineers who were the lead author on a DesignCon paper for the first time. Along with the other mentors, she worked with the new lead authors through the paper-creation process and was available to read a draft of the paper.

John Blyler is a Design News senior editor, covering the electronics and advanced manufacturing spaces. With a BS in Engineering Physics and an MS in Electrical Engineering, he has years of hardware-software-network systems experience as an editor and engineer within the advanced manufacturing, IoT and semiconductor industries. John has co-authored books related to system engineering and electronics for IEEE, Wiley, and Elsevier.