Shuo Chen was one of seven employees at The MITRE Corporation who received awards during the 2017 Women of Color STEM Conference.

The women were recognized for outstanding contributions to the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields and their commitment to encouraging young women to pursue STEM careers.

Chen, who is applying advanced speech recognition techniques to solve aviation problems, was presented with an award for technical innovation.

This award recognizes a woman who invents a product, device, or process and is a stereotype-breaking role model for women in technology.

Since joining MITRE, Chen has significantly improved the domain of air traffic control. She has applied various skills to advance research and develop solutions to air traffic control domain issues.

She most notably developed speech recognition technology to process voice communication between controllers and pilots.

This was a significant step in the improvement of air traffic safety. One of her earlier accomplishments was the creation of a bilingual training system.

The system used speech recognition and text-to-speech to train controllers in a simulation environment. Chen worked with controllers to understand their accents and phraseology to design and develop the Spanish components.

The resulting dual language system is in use today in Buenos Aires. When not working on engineering projects, Chen volunteers with a not-for-profit dance company as a teacher, sound engineer, stage manager, and technical director.