New global technology award boosts the careers of women researchers
Kiana Aran, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Diego, in the United States, is developing artificial intelligence-aided fingertip sensors for disease detection. Credit: Masayuki Nakano/Sony.
Despite many efforts towards bridging the gender divide, women are still underrepresented and underrecognized across the field of technology. According to The World Bank, female researchers and engineers still account for less than a third of technology-related jobs globally.
It is important for technologists to open up opportunities for women in the industry to advance, says Hiroaki Kitano, Executive Deputy President and Chief Technology Officer at Sony Group Corporation, based in Tokyo, Japan.
“At Sony, we recognize there is a representation issue for female researchers in science and technology” explains Kitano. “And we want to help improve the situation.” Most recently this has been through the creation on a new international award for women in technology, in partnership with Nature.
The ‘Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature’ recognizes three outstanding early to mid-career technology researchers whose work is driving a positive impact for our society and planet. The US$250,000 grant awarded to each recipient is designed to encourage the awardees to bet on ambitious and innovative ideas, which can be difficult with more restricted public funding, says Kitano.
In February 2025, Sony and Nature announced the inaugural winners and judges’ commendation. The researchers — from the United States, Australia, and Saudi Arabia — have been recognized by the judging panel for a number of innovative achievements. These include: building new types of detectors that fuse gene-editing technology and electronic chips; creating faster and more stable electronic chips using tiny lasers; and developing ‘digital twins’ of patients using supercomputers to model the progress of disease treatments.
Read more about this year’s winners.
Yating Wan, from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, won this year’s early career prize for her work on integrating light sources onto silicon chips for more energy-efficient data communication and information processing. Credit: Masayuki Nakano/Sony.
Diversity in tech: a natural match
Makiko Kan, one of Sony’s Distinguished Engineers, was one of the judges for this year’s award. Today, she leads an international team working on image sensors and signal processing technologies.
Kan says encouraging women in technology makes great sense in terms of driving innovation. “Diverse organizations have access to a wider range of ideas, which is what leads to innovation,” she says.
Kitano, an AI and robotics expert, agrees, adding that hearing diverse perspectives often provides the spark that propels research and development into new areas. “Discussions with diverse groups of people take time and the process is often complex, but the outcomes are more valuable than those derived from homogenous groups,” he argues.
Kan, herself, is a good example of the benefits of bringing disciplinary backgrounds together to innovate. In the 2000s, her expertise in number theory and error-correcting code theory was instrumental in bridging analogue and digital broadcasting technologies.
At the time, the advent of cheaper satellite technology made reliable digital broadcasting — which uses symbols to transmit information — begin to seem more practical than analogue signals, which use electron amplitude, phase and frequency to transmit information.
Kan used her theoretical mathematics research to help develop codes with low error rates that would shape many international broadcasting standards around digital technology. The codes she helped develop have been used in many applications, from wireless communications to memory storage.
As a global, technology-driven enterprise, Sony’s offerings — from movies and music to electronics and videogames — are anchored by employees from a wide range of cultural, disciplinary and other backgrounds. “Diversity is what makes our businesses possible,” says Kitano.
Kitano himself has been a vocal advocate for the establishment of the field of systems biology1, a scientific discipline that aims at a system-level understanding of biological systems.
Furthering this field has demanded building bridges between scientists from many different disciplines, from biology and biomedicine, to informatics and machinery engineering, he says. “The benefit of this diversity is a discipline that is able to more accurately model the complexity of real-world biology.”
Amanda Randles from Duke University in the United States received an award for her work on ‘digital twin’ technology. Her work uses wearable-device data to model how blood flows through a patient’s cardiovascular system to optimize personalized treatment strategies. Credit: Masayuki Nakano/Sony.
Leveraging opportunities
Kitano and Kan see the new award as a great opportunity for women scientists to take their research to the next level during their early- and mid-careers.
Beyond the benefits of the funding itself, the awardees will also be able to widen their opportunities for collaboration through Sony and Nature’s networks and the award events, says Kitano. This will help the awardees and finalists to increase their visibility outside their communities, expand their opportunities to share ideas, and raise funds for projects.
Hiroaki Kitano, chief technology officer at Sony, and Magdalena Skipper, editor in chief at Nature, shake hands at the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature awards ceremony held in Tokyo. The event was held in February, 2025. Credit: Masayuki Nakano/Sony.
“We hope the kind of attention the awardees get will have a ripple on effect for their opportunities,” says Kitano. “We would be very much delighted to see awardees who come back and say ‘Sony’s award has been a tipping point for my career’.”
Kan and Kitano would also like to grow the community around the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature, so that it can encourage more diversity among those who enter the field of technology. Female students are underrepresented in STEM education, Kan points out. In 2020, just 32% of tertiary graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) were women in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries2.
But studies have found that even a single hour of exposure to a female role model with a background in science can increase the probability of female high-school students enrolling in higher education STEM programmes by up to 30%3.
“The positive messages linked to this award really need to reach young people, even middle- and high school students,” says Kan. If young women can see that there’s a bright future for a woman as an engineer, more might enter STEM education streams, and this could change the whole field for the better, she argues.
The Sony researchers were also enthusiastically encourage scientists at the very beginning of their career should not feel intimidated about entering an application for the award.
“Research is 99% failure, and researchers need undaunted spirits to make important breakthroughs,” says Kitano. “With that same courage — I want to encourage them to apply for the award.”
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