West Orange Resident Lekshmi Pillai Receives NJIT’s Madame Mau Outstanding Female Engineer Award
Lekshmi Pillai, of West Orange, received the Madame Mau Outstanding Female Engineer Award at the 12th Annual Salute to Engineering Excellence sponsored by NJIT’s Newark College of Engineering (NCE). The event was held March 25, 2010 at NJIT.
Pillai, a senior studying chemical engineering, is a scholar in the Albert Dorman Honors College with a 3.89 grade-point average. Apart from her academic achievements,
she has an outstanding record of service to NJIT. In particular, she has served as the president of the American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s Student Chapter. Under her leadership, the chapter was designated an outstanding chapter by the national institute. She’s also secretary of Omega Chi Epsilon, the American honor society for chemical engineering students, and belongs to two other engineering honor societies.
She also has great work experience. She spent two summers working as an intern at ExxonMobil Corporation in Fairfax, Virginia, where she focused on simulation techniques. She did so well at her internships that ExxonMobil offered her a full-time job as a chemical engineer – a job she’ll begin after she graduates in May.
She has received corporate scholarships and awards from National Starch, AMMCO, Hess and Schering-Plough. She also has an NJIT Faculty Scholarship. At NJIT, she worked as a teaching assistant for the Center for Precollege Programs, where she tutored high school students in chemistry. She also worked as a student ambassador for the NJIT Admissions Office. In her engineering classes at NJIT, she studied the ill effects of global warming. So when she starts working as a chemical engineer for ExxonMobil, she hopes to work on projects that will reduce greenhouse gases and help discover alternative energy sources.