Cyber-Woman Engineer
Urbana, Illinois
In 2014 the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign commissioned creation of a statue celebrating women in engineering. Chicago artist Julie Rotblatt-Amrany sculpted "The Quintessential Engineer," which was unveiled outside the university's Micro- and Nano-Technology Laboratory on April 28, 2017.
Rotblatt-Amrany's bronze sculpture features a young woman who's solving engineering problems on the run. Suspended in front of her face is one of those virtual floaty computer screens people are always tapping in sci-fi films; this particular screen is filled with mysterious waves.
The woman is frozen in mid-dash, her hair tousled by forward motion, atop a platform of hexagons labeled INSPIRATIONAL, INNOVATIVE, CONFIDENT, PIONEERING, PASSIONATE. At her feet the hexagons are rising and turning into books and circuit boards -- and then morphing into her pants. The Quintessential Engineer is a triumph of hybrid engineering!