It was a true pleasure to attend the 2021 National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering Symposium (NAE FOE).
The NAE FOE is unique in bringing together engineers from all engineering disciplines. It was a blast. A rare opportunity to step back and learn about challenges in a wide variety of engineering areas, and to think about how one’s own work fits with the broader view of engineering as a profession. I kept thinking about the Iron Ring on my finger, and back to the ceremony, the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, where my graduating University of Ottawa class received these rings. I am thrilled that my professional journey has taken me from that ceremony to a Symposium dedicated to the frontiers of the profession.
Iron Ring is a reminder of the professional commitment of the engineer.
About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
