"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference", says Robert Frost, the American poet, in one of his most memorable poems. And this stands true for Uma Maheshwari who believed in carving out a career for herself that not many women dared to. In the late 90’s when jobs in the IT and ITeS sector were available a dime a dozen, Uma followed her passion and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in the Aerospace Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Science. Today, she heads a 110-strong team of engineers at GE Labs in Bangalore. "The entire journey has been a rollercoaster ride for me, with unexpected surprises," says Uma.

Upon completing her doctorate in 1999, Uma was the first to join GE Energy in a project that was a joint venture between GE and TCS, at the engineering level. As a young engineer, during the first few years she focused more on learning the technology and developed the skill sets that were essential for the analysis of complex fluid dynamics for gas turbine combustor components. With expertise in computational fluid dynamics, she was involved in the analysis for gas turbines followed by the design and development of gas turbine components. "It was quite exciting for me as I had great interest in core technical work and was involved in every level of it," she says.

A few years later she got an opportunity to lead the six-sigma Black Belt role for close to one and a half year. This was greatly unexpected since till then she had focused on growing only on the technical side. Though initially skeptical, with a little encouragement from her managers Uma took up the new responsibility and successfully completed the implementation. During this period, she got broad exposure and learnt coaching and mentoring skills, driving organizational initiatives, and developing strategies and roadmaps. She mentored more than 40 young engineers to apply the six-sigma principles to their product design and developed a business metrics dashboard that was later followed as a best practice across the GE Energy global sites for effective review of business operations.

After a maternity break of five months, Uma joined back GE Energy as the Leader of the Gas Turbine Combustion Center of Excellence (CoE), leading a team of 10 engineers working in the area of structural and fluid dynamics analysis of combustor components for gas turbines using computational methods. During the two years when she led this team, Uma gained rich experience by focusing both on technology and leadership skills. Her leadership skills and technical strengths were put to test when she was promoted as the leader of the Accessories and Systems Engineering team. "The accessory here refers to the systems present outside a power plant and the team was involved in designing these systems," she explains. She grew the team from 20 to 80 in just 3 years, while diversifying and adding technical competence and domain knowledge with added focus on quality and technical depth.

Currently Uma leads IGCC (Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle) at GE Labs, a process in which a low-value fuel such as coal, petroleum coke, orimulsion, biomass, or municipal waste is converted to low heating value, high-hydrogen gas in a process called gasification. The gas is then used as the primary fuel for a gas turbine.