Liliana Pasquale (she/her)

Liliana Pasquale (she/her) is an assistant professor at University College Dublin (Ireland) and a funded investigator at Lero — the Irish Software Research Centre. She obtained her master and PhD in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy). Her research focuses on engineering software and cyber-physical systems that satisfy security requirements and comply with existing data protection regulations. Liliana is actively promoting security in the university undergraduate curriculum and has developed a new module on secure software engineering currently taught at UCD.

1. Where’s your hometown?

San Severo (FG), Italy.

2. How did you get into STEM?

It was quite accidental. :-) Although I have always liked computers and technologies, I felt it was not something for “women”. I was studying to obtain a high school diploma from a Teacher Training School in my hometown in the South of Italy. One day, my English teacher told my mother I could study engineering, in her opinion. That planted a seed in my mind and gave me some confidence to pursue a career in Computer Engineering.

3. What is a piece of advice that you have found especially useful?

“Never a failure, always a lesson”: everyone will experience more failures than successes. However, if things don’t work as planned, it is important not to fill your mind with negative thoughts and not to lower your self-esteem. Instead, it is important to think about what aspects of your behavior or of your work style need to improve and draft a plan with concrete actions that you can take to achieve your goals. Success will come!

4. What’s a challenge you’ve faced, and how did you deal with it?

During my PhD, I found it very hard to find a research topic and write my first research papers autonomously. At the time, I also did not have a lot of self-esteem, because I thought I was not able to pursue a career in research.

What really helped me was to avoid comparing myself against other more successful PhD students. I was also very consistent, and I worked hard every day with a clear plan.

One of the first papers that I published is now my most cited paper.

5. What’s something you’ve done that you’re really proud of?

Supervising my first PhD student, who is now graduating.

I believe being a university lecturer gives us tremendous power to have an impact on students, for example, by motivating them to pursue a particular career path or simply influencing their way of thinking. In this line, I am also very proud to supervise 2 Final Year Projects aimed at using gamification to reduce plastic consumption and carbon footprints.

6. What are you most excited about right now, in or outside of STEM?

Something I am very excited about is Robot dexterity, i.e. the capability of robots to self-train to handle physical objects in the real world (https://openai.com/blog/learning-dexterity/).

This will tremendously increase the number of tasks that robots can handle autonomously in the near future.

7. What is your favorite source of inspiration?

I know this may sound like an unusual answer… Listening to rap music and Rihanna are huge inspirations for me.

8. What is your favorite book or movie?

Book: My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante.