Ying Lia Li (Lia), CEO and founder of Zero Point Motion, was named Woman of the Year at Best of Sensors 2023 in June for her sensors research, financial leadership and her commitment to equity in science.
Her research has led to five patents and she has been awarded a MyWorld grant to show sensors that monitor a person’s finger motion and force for each heartbeat, which could prove valuable in healthcare and other fields. Zero Point Motion, based in the UK, creates chipscale optical inertial sensors to improve positioning and navigation. She shared some of her thoughts on winning the award with Fierce Electronics.
FE: Lia, has your outlook changed since being named Woman of the Year at Best of Sensors 2023? And how does it feel to be recognized in this way? In other words, do you think women in engineering get enough credit?
Lia: I’m immensely grateful for the award. It marks a huge change in my career, too, as I left academia to start Zero Point Motion, so there’s something really comforting about being recognized for taking that step and the risks that come with it. Representation of women studying engineering is healthy and it’s clear that women are helping push the technological and commercial development of sensors, but perhaps disproportionately less recognized in status and therefore less so in awards.
FE: Can you speak to the difficulties you have faced as a woman in engineering? What did you do to overcome such problems?
Lia: The core difficulty when your gender, or even ethnicity, is less represented is feeling unrelatable and having to unpick imposter syndrome from the way people treat you because of stereotypes. You also have to rise above micro-aggressions or being taken less seriously, whilst still maintaining confidence and often needing to prove yourself by overachieving. Some examples of barriers I’ve faced include literally being the only woman at conference or seminar, being mistaken as a non-scientific contributor, needing to outperform to get recognition or to volunteer to be expected to take on more administrative or pastoral caring duties.
Many amazing women gave me advice early on, which was to surround myself with like-minded people, volunteer my time to supporting other women, and look beyond just gender inequality, too. So throughout my career I’ve found people that inspire me. They include Dr. Jess Wade who has written thousands of Wikipedia articles about women scientists. Committees I contribute to include running the Women in Physics Group at University College London and now being part of the SPIE ED&I committee. Friends in the field that I can talk to and learn from include Dr. Ilana Wisby, the CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits.
FE: What is your advice to young women engineers and young women engineering students? How should they approach this work amid the large surplus of men in the field and the reluctance of women to stay in the field which may be a bigger problem in the US, perhaps?
Lia: In the UK we have similar issues of representation of women in the sciences – although we have around 40% representation at the undergraduate level of women starting science degrees, which drops down to 20% remaining as professors and around 25% women within the science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce. My advice is to stay aware that there are challenges, and try to keep grounded by knowing that if you face adversity, it is likely institutional and societally driven, and not a reflection of your abilities – push through and find people to lift you up, including the large number of men trying to change the status quo, too.
FE: Can a ratio of more women to men in the work force make for a better company or perhaps better science and better products?
Lia: Diverse teams are known to produce higher average returns-- that's Morgan Stanley research-- and women-founded businesses deliver higher revenue – more than twice as much per dollar invested, based on Boston Consulting Group research. Similar trends are there for ethnically diverse teams. For example, ethnically diverse stock pricing teams were 58% more likely to price stocks correctly, according to Levine et al, 2014, PNAS, 111. Ethnic diversity is also the strongest predictor of a field’s scientific impact, according to Adams, 2013, Nature 497, 557–560. So the statistics back it up! And of course, I agree with the statistics as I’ve worked with some trailblazing women in defense, academia, the start-up community and with our suppliers.
FE: Your research has focused on optomechanics and quantum sensing. How can such products be expected to advance in coming years?
Lia: Optomechanics has traditionally been associated with bulky things like beam steering mirrors, but has recently been further developed through the advent of nanofabrication where tiny photonic and optical cavity structures can be fabricated at the sub-millimeter scale.
This breathes new life into sensing because you can create waveguides that are thinner than the wavelength of light passing through them, allowing the light field to massively interact with its surroundings and objects moving near it. This is what Zero Point Motion harnesses – the exquisite coupling between light and mechanical objects moving in response to acceleration and rotation. When using laser light, you can now exploit ultra-low noise readout, down to the quantum limit without needing cryogenics like you would with an electrical readout.
All of this is possible now, because semiconductor fabrication has spread to the photonics domain, so you can take a silicon wafer and etch thousands of waveguides which wasn’t possible before when only optical fiber-based structures could be made. On top of this, the likes of AR/VR, Lidar, optical communications and smartphones have driven mass adoption of chipscale lasers and detectors which means now is the perfect time for a startup like Zero Point Motion to create low cost mass market optical inertial sensors. Not only can we offer over 100 times lower noise floor inertial sensing, we can do it within a chipscale package, and push the cost down. Our longer roadmap is able to exploit quantum effects if the market calls for it, and that’s exciting – knowing that we can continuously redefine sensing limits.
FE: Your company is based in the UK. Has that been an advantage?
Lia: A question that often gets asked of me is why haven’t I moved to Silicon Valley since Zero Point Motion is a fabless silicon chip company. I think the UK, although it has a limited legacy of creating huge semiconductor or sensor companies, is still a fantastic hub for innovation, especially in the area of silicon photonics, and breeds a type of entrepreneurship spirit that probably coincides with being a small island! So I definitely want to give the UK a shout-out and some appreciation. That being said, we are always looking for relationships, team members and advisors from the US and globally – there are just some absolutely amazing women in Silicon Valley. too – Dr. Lisa Su, CEO and Chair of AMD, and Ginny Rometty, former CEO of IBM, come to mind – superstars I look up to!