Janet Tsai grew up in Colorado and with parents from Taiwan always was a minority within the white world of the Front Range. In our conversation we talked about what it felt like to grow up in Fort Collins, where classmates mistook her adopted friends from Korea as her siblings, her older sister’s nickname was ‘the brain’ and hers ‘the little brain’. Janet knows what it means to be an outsider not only in the US but also in China. Becoming part of the robotics team during high school eventually led to her first job right out of college: Roomba, maker of the first robotic vacuum cleaner, asked her to move to Hong Kong to be the liaison between American design engineers and Chinese manufacturing engineers for the newest Roomba design. In our conversation, Janet shares outrageous experiences of gender discrimination and harassment during her time in China. When she returned to the US, she became a teaching professor in the department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. In this role, she advocates for women and students from marginalized groups to pursue interests related to engineering and technology. She has tried to use her own experiences of gender and race discrimination and harassment in engineering as motivation to keep going, and inspiration to show younger students that things can be different. In her own words: “Being an engineer is a fun way to see the world, but I wish a lot of times that we connected more to the world.”

To learn more about Janet please visit:

http://www.janetytsai.com/

https://www.colorado.edu/engineering-facultystaff/janet-tsai