Laleh Behjat | Engineers Canada

Since 2009, Laleh Behjat has worked tirelessly to bring women and gender-diverse people into engineering and STEM while teaching electrical and software engineering at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering. Behjat says an inclusive engineering profession is essential to humanity’s future: “If we don’t have all perspectives on how we make the world, the world will not be made as a reflection of us.”

The impact of her work is extensive. As NSERC Prairie Chair for Women in Science and Engineering, she developed the WISE Planet leadership training program, in which early-career professionals learn about leadership with an equity and inclusivity lens and complete projects to address equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) gaps in STEM at their organizations while building their networks. She also co-established the Schulich Change Makers Network to provide scholarships to equity-seeking students, develop their leadership skills and teach them about EDI.

In 2019, Behjat helped launch the Bioengineering Summer Institute, which has increased women’s enrolment in engineering programs at Schulich. The four-week program provides high school students who have not taken physics, but have good grades in math and other sciences, with a fun and supportive way to complete that prerequisite.

During the pandemic, Behjat and several colleagues hosted biweekly online events to combat isolation among early-career women engineers. Featuring prominent speakers such as Donna Strickland, the incredibly popular events culminated in a joyful in-person workshop held in Banff last year.

Behjat also fundraises to send women students to conferences and workshops, and she is a member of the Women and Gender Constituency advocating for gender equality and women’s human rights.

“This work is not easy, it can be sometimes frustrating, but it’s more rewarding than anything else,” she says. “If I’m ever tired, I’ll just go talk with some of our students, and my heart fills with joy because I know that we are leaving the world in really good hands.”