Bosch names first female fellow at CU-ICAR

Citing a lack of diversity and women in male-dominated engineering automotive technology fields, Clemson University today announced its first Bosch fellow in a program aimed at diversifying the workforce to add women and minorities in the next generation of engineers and scientists.

Vismita Sonagra, an automotive engineering graduate student at the Clemson University-International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) who studies power train technology and teaches middle and high school teachers how to teach their science and math courses while stressing automotive technology.

Sonagra will receive $20,000 to continue her outreach at local schools to boost education in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) subjects critical to the Upstate's budding automotive sector.

Sonagra, from India, developed an interest in environmental conservation but also loved physics. Eventually she combined the two and now studies how to build energy-efficient engines.

She takes teachers to NASCAR racetracks to show them how the systems work. Then she goes into the schools to help teach students the same concepts.

"You can teach them about race flags and teach them math. Or you could teach them about how a car rolls and what are the kinds of Newton's Laws behind the car," Sonagra said.

When she visits schools or holds summer day camps at CU-ICAR during the summer, students are scared and confused, but also intrigued by automotive technology, she said.

"It's just a matter of exposing students, showing them what it's like," she said.

There's a lack of students in general going into automotive related fields in the U.S, Mike Mansuetti, president of Robert Bosch LLC, said Monday in Greenville.

"Diversity and its impact on innovation is really significant," Mansuetti said.

At Clemson, just 11 percent of students enrolled in the automotive program are females and six percent are minorities, said Dr. Imtiaz Haque, executive director of the engineering center at CU-ICAR.

"We want to change that," Haque said.

The most concerning trend among students interested in STEM fields is the increasing gender gap, Haque said.

"Male students are more than three times more likely to be interested in STEM than female ones, and that gap is widening," he said.

Recruiting the under-represented student groups is critical to CU-ICAR because the Upstate's automotive workforce needs to grow in numbers and diversity in order to thrive, he said.

Clemson is reaching into middle and high schools, including Dr. Phinnize J. Fisher Middle School, which opened in August on the CU-ICAR campus, to build early interest in STEM fields, he said.