Ritu Jha-
Engineering is the backbone of modern society,” says Piyush Malik, the founding president of the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) Silicon Valley and also its national chair.
On February 19, ASEI celebrated its volunteers and STEM students with various awards including cash, certificates and the coveted PVSA (US Presidential Volunteer Service Awards) while kicking off its 40th anniversary as well as ‘Engineers Week’, at a small event presided by Consul General Dr TV Nagendra Prasad at Amber Restaurant in Los Altos, California where Malik shared the forward vision and history of the formation of the non-profit in 1983.
Malik bats for engineers because he feels they have “played an integral role in designing, building, and maintaining the infrastructure that we all rely on every day. From the roads we drive on, to the buildings we work in, to the water we drink, engineers have helped to create the world we know and love.”
This year’s Engineers’ Week theme, ‘Imagining Tomorrow’ takes a look at future possibilities. “As we celebrate the achievements of engineers from the past, we must also look forward to the innovations that will shape our future,” Malik said.
ASEI was established by the late Dr Hari Bindal, who was conferred with the 2017 Pravasi Bharat Award. “He contacted more than 50 engineers across the US to obtain their consent by conducting a signature campaign and received 150 signatures of approval to form a networking organization for engineers amongst the diaspora.
“He then organized a meeting on 5 May, 1983, attended by the 26 founding members of ASEI and after much deliberation, a resolution was passed to form an organization of engineers from India.”
Soon after that, ASEI was registered as a non-profit organization with the IRS in Michigan, where Dr Bindal was from. “The aim was to further Indo-US technology relationships and have an inclusive place to network and grow professionally. That became the parent chapter and since then there have been various professional chapters formed across the US and they have also sponsored student chapters in many universities.”
The first chapter in California was formed in 2004 in Southern California, and in 2013 the National Chairman of ASEI visited the annual TiE conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center and there he met Piyush Malik and invited him to speak at ASEI’s convention in Irvine a few months later. Soon afterward, a request to help start a Silicon Valley chapter of ASEI followed.
“With the backing of IBM corporate CSR group and a seed funding from IBM local ERG, the ASEI Silicon Valley Chapter was founded,” said Malik who took the lead, and a two-member team with a prime focus on youth empowerment and to encourage and build the next generation of engineers and scientists was formed.
They organized a ‘Job Shadowing Day’ for 50 high-schoolers at IBM San Jose in 2015. Buoyed by the success of that program and outreach efforts to non-IBMers, a few more members joined hands.
The momentum started building and more programs were launched for the under-served in the community – a coding camp for middle- and high-schoolers led by Srini Vemula, an internship for university engineering grads and undergrads spearheaded by Rakesh Guliani.
Soon, a partnership with the Santa Clara Science Fair followed and each year out of hundreds of submissions, ASEI volunteer judges select 12 students for prizes. Those 12 students were then nominated for the National level ASEI Youth Technology Exposition (YTE) program across all chapters.
Malik said that over these four decades, ASEI has helped create an environment where Indian-origin engineers are not sneered upon as they were in the 1970s and 1980s, but respected for their talent.
“We have come a long way,” he says. “On many occasions, startups are not funded unless they have an Indian technical founder or cofounder. All of this has happened because of the closer Indo-US technical collaboration and creation of an environment that helped Indian techies thrive in the US.”
He added, “ASEI SoCal and Washington DC chapters were re-energized in the last 2 years and the latest chapter formed in 2022 is in Dallas. We hope to be able to revive our Seattle and San Diego chapters in the near future and also look at more cities for expansion going forward.
ASEI has over 6000 members from technical and engineering backgrounds. Malik said the ASEI has awarded over $250,000 over these years in scholarships at graduate and undergraduate engineering level.
“In the last two years alone, we have served 50 mentor-mentee pairs, over 60 knowledge-sharing webinars and virtual technical sessions. We have organized 6 deep dive summits on a variety of topics – AI, Sustainability, Energy, Cybersecurity, CXO, AeroSpace – with 20 to 30 high calibre speakers and executives from across the world in each event sharing their wisdom. “
As we observe International Women’s month in March, it is fitting to mention that under Malik’s leadership, in the past several years, not only has ASEI driven programs for youth empowerment but also through a determined focus on DEIB, has increased diversity in ASEI board with the percentage of women rising from 0% at inception to over 35% now. Several organizations such as NCWIT and NAAAP have taken notice of this work over the past years and recently recognized ASEI student members as well as its leadership.
“ASEI has organized over 34 national conventions in different cities over the past 40 years. We are getting ready to host our 35th national convention in Michigan in September 2023, and would love your participation” Malik added.
