Celebrating Women in the Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering
While UPEI’s Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering (FSDE) aims year-round to build a community that reflects the various branches of society it serves, there are several dates between February and June when they intentionally consider how equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI)—in particular, the representation of women—can be integrated into engineering education and research. These dates include February 11, the International Day of Women and Girls in Science; the month of March, which is National Engineering Month; and June 23, the International Day of Women in Engineering.
Women make up more than half of the Canadian population but are significantly underrepresented in engineering education and in the engineering profession. Over the past decades, the number of women enrolled in post-secondary engineering programs has risen, as has the number of women in the engineering profession. Yet despite steady increases in the representation of women, men still vastly outnumber women in engineering.
UPEI is starting to see a positive shift in the representation of women students and faculty in the FSDE, and these women are not only achieving great success in the profession but are also contributing to further improving the participation rates of women and girls in STEM. Five of FSDE’s professors are women, exceeding the national average: Drs. Stephanie Shaw, Yulin Hu, Libby Osgood, Amy Hsiao, and Suzanne Kresta. Drs. Kresta and Hu are on the Stanford top 2% list for impact in their research areas.
On the student front, 50% of the Atlantic Canada contingent competing at the recent Canadian Engineering Competition were from UPEI, and of the FSDE students who attended, 50% identified as women or from visible minority groups.
The University would like to take the opportunity to shine a spotlight on the achievements of some of these women to bring even more attention to the need to continue this important EDI work throughout the year.
Student superstars
While not a complete list, here are a few FSDE women students making their mark.
Kaitlyn Smith, current Engineering Student Society president, was recognized with one of 20 national leadership awards from the Canadian Federation of Engineering Students. Kaitlyn was very active in the organization of the Canadian Engineering Leadership Conference hosted at UPEI in 2025.
Lilly O’Rielly was recognized with the Address Root Causes for Impact/Living our Values award from Engineers Without Borders Canada and the CD Howe Award.
Abby Chapman has a number of accolades, mostly recently the OPTICA Women Scholar 2026 award. This international award is given to 20 women students on merit to empower the next generation of women leaders in optics and photonics. Abby competed with MSc and PhD students for this honour and was the only Canadian selected. She works with Sundeep Singh (FSDE) and Bill Whelan (Physics).
Leah MacPhail, a student-athlete, is currently studying at Arizona State University as a Killam Fellow.
Professors breaking the EDI glass ceiling
Dr. Libby Osgood is a 3M National Teaching Fellow and the longest serving faculty member in the FSDE. She was part of the original design team for our forward-looking, design-centered program, which was perhaps the first across Canada to realize the importance of relationships with community, partners, and clients in engineering design courses. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (Design Assessment Techniques in Engineering Education) from Dalhousie and has published extensively (21 journal papers) in this area, frequently with undergraduate co-authors. Her scholarship has been recognized with four international awards: two from the American Society for Engineering Education and two best book awards. The inclusive design of the Engineering Success Centre has evolved from a COVID-support concept to student-led successes that include professional certifications in CAD (CSWA–31 students and CSWP–5 students), our extraordinary success over three years in the Atlantic and Canadian Engineering Competitions, and our annual Career Fair. Her fondest memories are of the early days in the program, where she led robotics clubs with 10 to 14-year-olds as a form of outreach and engagement. Since 2014, Libby has co-organized Girls Get WISE—a full day STEM event for initially 80 grade 7–9 students, and now 100 K-12 female-identifying students, with several FSDE students, faculty, and deans participating as volunteers—a moment that affirms the volunteers’ identity as well as provides many positive role models for the participants. This event is offered in partnership with the Girl Guides and STEAM PEI.
Dr. Suzanne Kresta, Dean, identifies as a champion for inclusive engineering education, with a particular personal interest in neurodivergent learners. While she has slowly become known as a feminist, she prefers to keep her feminism in action rather than in activism. As a dean, she holds allyship for over 15 different vulnerable groups as a core responsibility. She has been recognized with national and international awards in teaching, leadership, and research excellence, an Honorary Doctorate from McMaster University, and a Queens Jubilee Medal from the Province of Saskatchewan. In Saskatchewan, she was part of the design team for RE-ENGINEERED, a competency-based and student-centered first-year engineering program. As part of this program, she co-created and co-taught a six-week module in which the practice of engineering is placed in an Indigenous context. This was a deep dive into one of the most complex EDI challenges faced by our country, and she was honoured to engage with 500 first-year students every year as they grappled with these difficult conversations. The many ways in which their own identities had been shaped deepened her own commitment to inclusion and belonging. She sees the shape of consultation, which is laid out in UNDRIP (the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), as a statement of respect and engagement that all communities want and deserve. She sees the program in the FSDE as giving life to these values and is very proud to be leading this group of scholars, talented technical and administrative staff, and emerging student leaders.
Dr. Amy Hsiao, Professor, holds an undergraduate degree from MIT and an MS and PhD from Carnegie Mellon, an MBA from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and was a Chateaubriand Postdoctoral Fellow. She is recognized as an expert in crystallization kinetics and sustainable, novel metallic materials for energy and manufacturing and is an established researcher, with industry collaborations, peer-reviewed and research funding over $8M in her career. She is one of the inaugural Fellows in the Canadian Engineering Education Association (CEEA), for which she served as president from 2021–22. The CEEA conference that year, which marked the end of her presidency, sparked a movement to "retool" the Iron Ring Ceremony—an obligation ceremony for engineers entering the profession—to be more inclusive in content and purpose for the future of the Engineering profession in Canada. While this conversation had been active in the community for close to 30 years, this act of advocacy was perhaps the final straw that sparked meaningful action. Dr. Hsiao is recognized as a champion for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and has been active in several initiatives with Engineers PEI, Engineers Canada, and NSERC, and a number of other grants in support of promoting underrepresented groups in engineering. She currently serves as Vice-Chair of the Engineering Qualifications Board for Engineers Canada and is a Fellow of Engineers Canada. She was one of two individuals selected by Engineering Deans Canada as EDI experts to serve on a working group that produced a report mandated by the board of Engineers Canada on advancing equity through engineering accreditation. She has served on the Board of the Wind Energy Institute of Canada since 2015 and chaired the first Research Committee. She created and leads the five-week summer research opportunity for female and non-binary students in Grades 11 and 12 called ProGRES: Promoting Girls in Research in Engineering and Sustainability at UPEI, which led into also creating and leading FIRES: Fostering Indigenous Representation in Engineering and Sustainability and IDEaLS: Inclusion of Diversity in Engineering and Leadership in Sustainability. These initiatives have impacted the Island community since 2017 (including current students Leah and Lilly, mentioned above, who are ProGRES alumna, and Kaitlyn and Abby, who have been ProGRES student mentors). Dr. Hsiao has led Go Eng Girl and Go Code Girl events at UPEI and is the Engineers Canada 30-by-30 University Champion for PEI. At UPEI, she was the inaugural FSDE Graduate Studies Coordinator and spearheaded the Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy programs for the Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering, as well as introducing the first EURA—Engineering Undergraduate Research Awards to promote undergraduate research. Her awards for educational and engineering leadership include the Janet Pottie Murray Award for Leadership (2025, UPEI Faculty Association), Engineers PEI Excellence in Engineering Award (2022), Engineers PEI Advancement of Diversity in the Engineering Profession Award (2018), IEEE Canadian Atlantic Section 2020 Outstanding Engineering Education Award, and Professional Engineers and Geoscientists Newfoundland and Labrador Teaching Award (2014).
