 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aisha Gundes. She is a professor at the University of Florida College of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me. So congratulations are in order because you are an Abbey Award winner, which is awards given out by the Anita Borg Institute, and you have been given the Denise Denton Emerging Leader Award. So tell us a little bit about your award. Well, thank you for asking. We've heard a lot about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg throughout the conference. But Denise Denton, she was actually a very close friends with Anita, and she was a leader in her field. Her field was development of polymers, and she worked on the first development of the RAM, but she was actually the first ever dean of a college of engineering at a major university in the United States. First ever woman. Yes, first of all woman dean, yes. So she became dean at the University of Washington, and then she actually became chancellor at University of California. But just beyond her research, she really promoted and lifted the people around her. So she was a big proponent of minority issues. So she supported females, she supported international students, and she was openly gay, so she really had a big influence on the LGBTQ community. So I just wanted to just recognize her and say that how honored I am to have my name mentioned alongside hers. This award is given to a junior faculty member that has done significant research and also has had an impact on diversity as well, and Denise is a great inspiration. Yes, no, and the award given in homage to Denise, so your research is about detecting neurological disorder. So tell our viewers a little bit more about what you're doing. Sure, so I'm an electrical engineer by training and who does brain research for a living. So this confuses a lot of people, but I basically tell them that our brains have bioelectric fields that generate biopotential signals that we can record, and we're really trying to decipher what these signals are trying to tell us. So we're really trying to understand and treat neurological disorders as well as psychiatric disorders. So I work with a lot of neurosurgical patient populations that receive electrode implants as part of their therapy, and we're trying to now improve these technologies so that we can record these brain signals and decode them in real time so that we can adapt things like deep brain stimulation for the current pathology that these patients are having. So deep brain stimulation currently is working like, think of an AC and it's working on fan mode. So it's constantly blowing cold air into the room, even though the room might be just the perfect temperature. So we're basically trying to listen to the brain signals and only deliver electricity when the patient is having a pathology. So this way, we're basically turning the AC onto the auto mode so that once they're actually not having symptoms, unnecessary electrical city is not delivered into their brain. So pacemakers when they were invented were functioning that way. So people realize they can stimulate the heart and the person would not have a cardiac arrest, but now we know that we can detect the heart pulse very easily. So then someone thought about, okay, so when we don't detect the pulse heartbeat, let's only stimulate the pacemaker then. So that's what we're trying to adapt to the neuro technologies. And what is the patient response? I mean, I imagine that that's incredible. I mean, so these are people who suffer from things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome. I mean, it's a small patient population that you're working with now, but what are you finding? So first of all, our patients are very gracious to volunteer for our studies. We find that for instance, in Tourette's syndrome, we can actually detect when people are having ticks in voluntary ticks that is characteristic of Tourette's syndrome. We find that we can differentiate that from voluntary movements. So we can really deliver the stimulation when they're having these symptoms. So this is a paroxysmal disorder. They really don't need continuous stimulation. So that's one thing we're developing. We find that in essential tremor, again, when people aren't having tremor, we can detect that and then stop the stimulation and only deliver it when necessary. We're working on a symptom called freezing up gates in Parkinson's disease. So people define this as having to will to walk, but they feel like their feet are glued to the floor. So this can cause a lot of falls. And at that really age, this can be very, very dangerous. So we can actually tell from the brain when people are walking and then we turn the stimulation in this particular area only during that time so as to prevent any falls that might happen. So it's really changing their life and how they are coping with this disease. Yes, true. And it really makes going to work in the morning very, very exciting for us. So another element of the Abbey Award is that you are helping improve diversity in your field and in the spirit of Denise Denton, helping young women and minorities rise in engineering. Yes, so I'm going to talk about this in the keynote session tomorrow, but I really just realized that all my confidence in throughout engineering school was due to the fact that I actually had a female undergraduate advisor. And once I came to that realization, I joined the Association for Academic Women at the University of Florida, which was established in 1974 because these pioneering women vote for equal pay for male and female faculty on campus. And this is still honored today. So I'm very honored to be serving the Association as its president today. All of our membership dues go to the Citation Awards for female doctoral students that are emerging scholars in their fields. And I also approached the National Science Foundation and they supported the funding for me to generate a new emerging STEM Award for female students in the STEM field. So that is my contribution. So you're passing it on, the help and the mentoring that you received as a young faculty member. I truly hope so. Yes, I mean, right now we're so focused on the technology companies, but on the campuses, on the undergraduate and graduate school campuses, how big a problem is this, would you say? So I'm a faculty in biomedical engineering. So in our field, we actually have some of the highest female to male ratios compared to other engineering fields. People attribute this to the fact that females like to contribute to the society. So they like to work on problems. Yeah, they like to work on problems that have a societal impact. And I think working with basically, disorders in any branch of medicine, it really fires up female students. But yes, when we go to other departments such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, the ratio is really, really small. And it still is a problem. And therefore, we're really trying to mobilize all female faculty just to be present. Just the fact that you're there, that you're a successful female in this field. The role models. Yeah, it really makes an impact. I think the most repeated quotes at this meeting is that you can't be what you can't see. So we're really trying to support female faculty. So we're trying to retain female faculty so that the younger generation of females can see that they can and they will do it as well. You can't be what you can't see. I love that. Those are words to live by. Well, thank you so much, Aisha. This is a pleasure meeting you, a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you so much. Pleasure's mine. We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.