Peggy Layne, P.E., retired from Virginia Tech in 2019 after serving as Assistant Provost for Faculty Development and director of the AdvanceVT program, a National Science Foundation sponsored program to increase the number and success of women faculty in science and engineering. As director of Virginia Tech's NSF ADVANCE program, she led initiatives to increase gender equity in faculty hiring, development, retention, and advancement. Ms. Layne has degrees in environmental and water resources engineering and science and technology studies. She spent 17 years as a consulting engineer in the fields of water and wastewater treatment and hazardous waste management, and a year as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow in the United States Senate, where she was responsible for water, wastewater, and solid and hazardous waste policy issues for Senator Bob Graham. A registered professional engineer, Layne served as president of the Society of Women Engineers in 1996-97. She is the editor of Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers and Women in Engineering: Professional Life, published by ASCE Press in 2009, and a contributor to the Society of Women Engineers' review of scholarly literature on women in engineering published annually in SWE Magazine.
Ms. Tietjen is the President and CEO of Technically Speaking, Inc. An electrical engineer, she has spent more than 40 years in the electric utility industry where she provided planning consulting services to electric utilities and organizations comprising the electric utility industry and served as an expert witness before public utility commissions and other government agencies. In 2015, she served as the CEO of the National Women's Hall of Fame, based in Seneca Falls, New York (the birthplace of women's rights). Today, she is a worldwide advocate for telling women's stories and writing women into history. An author and national speaker, Tietjen is the co-author of the award-winning and bestselling book
Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America. Her introduction to engineering textbook,
Keys to Engineering Success, was published by Prentice Hall in 2001. Previously (as Jill S. Baylor), she was a contributing author to the 1995 book
She Does Math! Tietjen is the co-author of the
Setting the Record Straight series of which three volumes have been published. Her book,
Inspiring Women of the National Women's Hall of Fame, was published in 2015. Her ebook for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' Women in Engineering series titled
Recognizing and Taking Advantage of Opportunities was published in 2016. She is the series editor for Springer's Women in Engineering and Science series and wrote the inaugural volume (published in 2016),
Engineering Women: Re-visioning Women's Scientific Achievements and Impacts. She has since written a second volume in the series,
Scientific Women: Re-visioning Women's Scientific Achievements and Impacts (in press). She blogged for
The Huffington Post from 2014-2018. Her award-winning and bestselling book
Hollywood: Her Story, An Illustrated History of Women and the Movies was published in 2019. Tietjen graduated from the University of Virginia (Tau Beta Pi, Virginia Alpha) with a B.S. in Applied Mathematics (minor in Electrical Engineering) and received her M.B.A. from the University of North Carolina - Charlotte. She is a registered professional engineer in Colorado.
