Maria Watkins

Marja "Maria" Ludwika Watkins (; 2 December 19182 September 2010) was a defence electronics engineer, lecturer and President of the Women's Engineering Society.

Early life Ziff was born on 2December 1918 in Vienna, Austria, and grew up in the Polish city of Lvov. Her parents were of Ukrainian descent; her father was director of a bank, and her mother was a research chemist at Lvov University.

Education In 1938, Ziff applied to study electrical engineering at the University of Edinburgh. She was accepted and moved to Scotland, surprising the professor who had offered her a place, as he had believed her application was from a Polish man. She became the first woman to study electrical engineering there. She joined the Women's Engineering Society on her arrival in the UK in 1939. In 1941, she graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in Electrical Engineering (Communications). As the situation worsened in Europe, her family refused to join her. Following the invasion of Poland by Russia and Germany, her parents and grandparents died in the concentration camps, only her sister surviving. She never felt able to return to Poland. She also attended the 1991 ICWES in Coventry. She undertook research in medical electronics and published at least 13 papers on these subjects. She was a visiting professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Boston, USA from 1973 to 2010, spending a term teaching there in 1975.

Watkins was a driving force in its work encouraging schoolgirls to consider engineering as a career, and acted as WES's careers officer for some years. She was elected WES President from 1980 to 1981, succeeding Veronica Milligan and being succeeded by Rosemary West. In 1984, she donated the Watkins Medal to WES to be awarded to the best female engineering graduate of the year. She held tea parties for women engineering students at City University and encouraged them to join WES for the support it could offer their careers. He was a fellow engineering student at Edinburgh and had returned from active service in the Second World War. In 1947, they made their home in Sydenham, joined by her younger sister, who had survived the war, and her mother-in-law. The couple had two sons, born in 1947 and 1951. She took his surname, and was often called Maria rather than Marja from this period onwards.

Death Maria Watkins died in on 2September 2010 at Highgate, London, and was cremated on 13September 2010. Her obituary was published in The Woman Engineer journal.