Sonia Heemstra de Groot

I cannot say that I knew I was going to study engineering since I was a child. I found many subjects very interesting and I had not a particular preference for any of them. I finally decided for electrical engineering because I was charmed by the a bit romanticized image of the “ability of engineers to turn imagination into reality”. And the study had a name of being difficult, which although it scared me a bit, had an irresistible attraction force because I love challenges.
In 2003, I became the first recipient of the Marina van Damme Prize at the University of Twente. At that time, the prize was for female entrepreneurship. I received the prize because I co-founded the Twente Institute for Wireless and Mobile Communications (WMC), a research, consulting and product development company with 14 employees.
Going back to the beginning of my career, I studied electrical engineering at the National University of Mar del Plata, in Argentina. Later I moved to the Netherlands and got my PhD at the University of Twente. After several years as a senior researcher at Ericsson EuroLab in the Netherlands, I co-founded WMC, where I was Chief Scientist from 2003 to 2014. In addition to my job at WMC, I work one day a week at the university to keep in touch with academia. Since 2012, I have been a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology where I hold the part-time Chair in Heterogeneous Network Architectures.
Since September 2016, I am also director of the Center for Wireless Technology Eindhoven (CWTe), a multidisciplinary organization where five research groups from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology collaborate on diverse topics such as ultra-high data rates, Internet of Things, optical-wireless convergence and future mobile and wireless networks like 6G. Also in the future I will continue doing research and look for new challenges.
Being the first recipient of the Marina Van Damme Award, it has been a pleasure to see the network growing from a single person to what it is now, a large group of talented women with very diverse technical background and inspiring, helping, and motivating each other.