Kathleen Kramer will moderate a panel with San Diego young professionals and women in engineering from General Atomics, Cubic Mission Solutions, Northrop Grumman, and Viasat.  About the panelists:

Rima Hajjar-Dalton is a System Performance Engineer at the Electromagnetic System Division at General Atomics (GA-EMS). Currently, Dr. Hajjar is a member of the Modeling and Simulation team at GA-EMS. She is in charge of modeling and simulating the arrestment of aircrafts on the next generation Ford-class aircraft carriers.  She earned a Bachelors degree in General Physics and a Master’s degree in high-temperature Plasma Physics from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She earned her PhD in Nuclear Engineering from the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of California, San Diego in 2018.

Fatoumata Gaye works for Cubic Mission Solutions (CMS) helping to design the power system of their ISR-ONE UAV.   She graduated from Cal Poly Pomona with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. She is currently a master’s degree candidate in engineering - battery technology from San Jose State University. She loves her career in engineering and is a huge advocate of seeing more women join this very exciting field.  When Fatoumata is not working, she likes to cook, play soccer at the beach and have movie nights with her family.

Hamna Khan is a Hardware Engineer at Northrop Grumman on the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node (BACN) Program. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from UC San Diego. She is a Gordon Fellow and a recipient of the Alumni Service Award for her contributions to the UCSD’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department. Hamna currently serves as the President of the ECE Alumni Advisory Board of Directors. She is a member of the IEEE.  She aspires to work in Congress as a technology staffer and plans to pursue her graduate studies.

Ellie Hallner works at Viasat as an Operations Program Manager (OPM) leading cross functional teams to define and execute the production testing, integration and manufacturing process for new hardware designs of various Viasat SATCOM modems. She graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with a degree in mechanical engineering. After graduating college, she started working for Viasat as a mechanical design engineer but wanted to have a greater impact in the product life span so she advanced to a management role in operations. While working full time, Ellie is attending UCLA this fall to pursue a master’s degree in Business Administration. After completing her master’s degree, Ellie is hoping to move back into product development to lead a team to design new products while having a broad knowledge of engineering, operations and business.