Clarkson History Professor Laura Ettinger will showcase her award-winning short documentary, Trailblazers: The Untold Stories of Six Women Engineers, during a panel discussion at WE22, the Society of Women Engineers Annual Conference being held October 20-22, 2022 in Houston, TX.
First, Ettinger’s documentary will be shown and then she will moderate a panel discussion with four of the trailblazers featured in the documentary. It tells the stories of a diverse group of U.S. women engineers who graduated from college in the 1970s, a time when a small but growing cohort of women entered the field. In Trailblazers, the women share their experiences of overcoming obstacles and paving the way for the next generation. Their stories are powerful and inspirational. They help us to understand how women engineers navigated challenges and provide institutions with motivation and tools to address them.
Ettinger and filmmaker Zac Miller, communication and media instructor at Clarkson, and founder of the boutique production company, Uncommon Image Studios, collaborated to capture the contributions of these six groundbreaking American women. The documentary can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miDLLxHRNow
Ettinger’s game-changing work for the National Science Foundation also resulted in three short educational videos that go along with the documentary. These videos are designed to empower middle school and early high school girls to become interested in STEM fields. They can be found at: https://www.clarkson.edu/inspire