Feature

Young Bangladeshi Engineer honoured in USA

Star campus Desk

ENGINEER Afsana Nahid Akhter, after completing her “O” & “A” level (1994) from Scholastica School in Dhaka went to Boston and obtained her B.S. and M.S. (1999) in 'Electrical Engineering with Computer Science' from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. She is presently the Director of Business Development at Medullan Inc, a Cambridge health-care IT, USA.

Akhter was recently chosen as one of the “10 Women to Watch 2008” by the prestigious weekly business newspaper of New England “The Mass High Tech Publication” with a circulation of 60,000 in the business community. The award is for women who have made a dramatic impact to date on their industry as well as to the communities with which they are involved.

"I like working on the front lines," she said. "My role is to find great applications and build systems in a highly collaborative way." Her talent is essential for IT projects in health care, where decisions are made by large committees. Take, for instance, her first big project with Medullan, a wellness portal developed for employees of Partners Healthcare under its Center for Connected Health.

Akhter led fitness instructors, nutritionists, cardiologists, third-party vendors and others to build a website for employees to keep weekly exercise and food logs and activity charts, along with the possibility of winning prizes for reaching health goals. Employees use pedometers to track daily walking. "The theory is that if you can measure it, you can improve it," she said.

Another of her projects for the Massachusetts Healthcare Quality and Cost Council is a public website to help consumers compare the quality of care and costs at area hospitals. "I am passionate about getting information into the hands of consumers so they can play an active part in their health," she said.

Next she wants to develop telehealth applications that allow patients with diabetes and chronic conditions, for instance, to monitor their vital signs. A simple interface trumps bells and whistles, she said.

"Sometimes even the most basic solutions are the best. It's not about whiz-bang technology, but how to use basic technology to produce a wide impact," she said.

Akhter made the transition from engineering to sales in her first job at Cisco Systems Inc., where she was hired as an engineer in voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). At Mazu Networks Inc., where she served as its first sales engineer, she built a 10-person technical sales team and groomed it to be self-led. At Cisco Systems she supported design and deployment of voice over IP (VoIP) products for service providers.

Raised in Bangladesh, Akhter came to Boston as a college freshman. She keeps ties with MIT as a career adviser to the Bangladeshi Students Association. "It offers me a taste of my home culture, and I provide mentoring," she said.

She has also served on the board of Indus Women Leaders, an organization to empower South Asian women leaders. And she serves in a community health organization in Bangladesh that trains young women as birthing assistants.