This year marks the eleventh occasion on which the prestigious Engineer Powerwoman Award has been presented, and three women have made it to the finals. On Friday, 21 April 2023, one of them will be named Engineer Powerwoman 2023 at the opening of the WomenPower Career Congress. The initiative is intended to encourage companies to reward and promote the performance and special commitment of their female employees in STEM careers even more than they do at present.

The three women nominated for the Engineer Powerwoman Award are (in alphabetical order):

Dr. Cristina Alonso Alija is the Head of the Sustainability, Safety, Health and Environment department at Bayer AG. She studied chemistry and engineering in Barcelona, Spain, where she also completed her PhD in organic chemistry. Following this, her international career took her to the Netherlands, Argentina, Mexico, the USA and finally Germany. Dr. Cristina Alonso-Alija is passionate about science and a role model for all women in STEM careers. Among other awards, Dr. Cristina Alonso-Alija has received the Otto Bayer Medal for research on soluble guanylate cyclase stimulators, which led to the introduction of the innovative drug Adempas® (riociguat). She has also co-authored 19 scientific articles published in international journals (including Nature) and has been named as a co-inventor on 38 patent applications. As a sponsor of various corporate initiatives, Christina is committed to equal opportunities for women and men, for colleagues with different sexual orientations, and for people with and without disabilities.

Dr. Christina Franke joined Bosch Rexroth in Stuttgart in June 2022 as Head of Development in the Assembly Technology business unit. After studying design and production engineering at the University of the Saarland, and a year abroad in Sweden, she began working as a research assistant at the Institute of Production Engineering in 1999. In December 2003, Dr. Franke completed her dissertation on "Process Chain Planning in the Digital Factory" at the University of the Saarland. In June 2004, she started her career as a trainee in the Bosch Group, and quickly took on management tasks in Production and Quality Management. From 2011 to 2015, she was involved in setting up production at the Powertrain plant in Wuxi, China. This was followed by an assignment as a consultant to the Bosch Executive Board. In 2017, she joined the Central Purchasing Division of the Bosch Group as Head of Technical Project Purchasing for Commercial and Offroad Vehicles for Powertrain Solutions. From mid-2019 onward, she was responsible for the engineering arm of the Central Research and Pre-development Division, where among other things she led innovation work in the areas of Industrie 4.0 and electric mobility.

Zen-Zen Yen is an up-and-coming leading personality in the pharmaceutical industry. She holds a master's degree in biotechnology from the Technical University of Braunschweig, and started her career at Bayer AG in 2015 as part of the International Future Leadership Program. Within the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE), Zen-Zen Yen was instrumental in establishing an "Emerging Leader" group for young professionals in the area of the German-speaking countries in 2016, as well as developing the global Women in Pharma (WIP) program and the regional Women in Pharma group in 2018. The goals here were to provide mentoring and promote career development among female professionals in these disciplines. Since 2016, she has organized several highly successful networking events, hackathons and mentoring programs in Europe and North America. In doing so, she provided a forum for women to exchange career-development ideas and strategies in the pharmaceutical industry. In 2019, Zen-Zen Yen became the first woman to join the Advisory Board of ISPE D/A/CH (the largest global non-profit organization in the pharmaceutical industry), of which she is now Vice Chair. In addition to all these achievements, she is also the international chair of ISPE Emerging Leaders.

The sponsors are: Continental, Volkswagen, Zeiss, Rossmann, Altair, Bayer, Bundeswehr, Emerson, Finanzinformatik, Mercedes Benz, BTC, Phoenix Contact und Salzgitter.