Creative engineering

Selected as one of 10 individuals from universities around the country to join Intel Corporation’s selective Rotational Engineers Program, Ninoshka Singh earned an opportunity to pursue her passion in computer graphics and engineering beginning September 2009. Currently, Ninoshka is doing her second rotation, working alongside some of the top research scientists and engineers at Intel Labs in the Throughput Computing Lab. She is very excited to be working on demonstrating a three-dimensional medical volume rendering application on one of Intel’s future graphics architectures, notes a family source.

In her senior year of engineering school, Ninoshka had partnered her twin sister Natasha, also an engineering student, to win first place in the annual microcontroller competition of the Cornell College of Engineering. Natasha who had earlier interned for Lockheed Martin (LM) Corporation was recently selected to join their renowned Engineering Leadership Development Program, notes a write-up on the 23-year-old twins by Behram Dastur. Besides engineering, Natasha will be undertaking finance and business job functions whilst simultaneously pursuing her masters in systems engineering at Cornell. Involved in engineering community service, Natasha led the electrical engineering career booth at the LM Women in Engineering Day event, mentored high school students during that time, and was interviewed about the program on a local Syracuse TV news channel.

In their first two years of college, both the sisters were invited to join the nine time world champion, Cornell FSAE engineering project team where students design and develop a Formula One style race car competing with nearly 140 university teams from across the world. Formula SAE is a student design competition initiated in 1978 and organized by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Ninoshka was a key player on the team that designed and built a totally new LCD dashboard for the 2006 race car. Natasha had collaborated with two other students to design and build the race car dashboard and wiring harness. The Cor-nell team holds more first place trophies from the annual FSAE competition than any other participating university/organization, writes Dastur.

Blessed with a keen, intellectual mind and artistic talents, the sisters chose to pursue a career in a technical field where they could marry their interests in engineering and computer graphics. Both of them opted for two advanced animation classes. With the insights gained Natasha was able to design, direct and produce two short films. Ninoshka studied intensive graphics processing of animation scenes under the renowned Prof Donald Greenberg and conducted exciting research to analyze the central processing unit performance of a server system. Despite a busy schedule Natasha plays basketball during summer and loves snowboarding in winter.

For her academic and extracurricular accomplishments Ninoshka was awarded the Society of Women Engineers scholarship in her freshman year. Both the girls had also been conferred academic scholarships by the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America. Their younger sister Kyra is a junior in college.

Born to Aban and Krishan Pal Singh in Charleston, South Carolina, Natasha and Ninoshka subsequently migrated to Philadelphia. In their younger days the twins had redesigned their high school athletic website and founded a Computer and Technology Club, providing weekly tutorials on web design and Adobe programs such as Flash and Fireworks. The interest generated in this Club prompted their school to introduce a web design course to the curriculum. One of their innovative research products "is currently under review for a potential patent,” mentions Dastur.