Setting the bits free

Some people find it suprising that many top network engineers are women. Polina Bayvel is one such person at the very top of her field, specialising in optical communications. Li Zhang, a Lecturer at the University of Leeds, is another mother of two who works in the area of engineering network communications. After studying electronics she worked at a software design centre in China before coming to the UK. Unlike whose messages never escape their cables, Li has specialised in wireless communications: where the messages fly free and so the problems are different. Wireless is making the mobile computing revolution possible. Using as little power as possible now matters to help those tired batteries. It's also much harder to send lots of data at once. Those are the kinds of problems Li is tackling.