Lighting the path

Leadership comes naturally to Wanda Reder, vice president of the Power Systems Services Division of S&C Electric Company, and the president of the IEEE's Power & Energy Society (PES). Reder grew up on a ranch in a small town in western South Dakota and didn't really know what an engineer was. Though her father was mechanically oriented, she says her freshman high school algebra teacher put her on the engineering path. "My teacher said to me, 'If I had to do it over again, I would.' And so that was the beginning. I knew I was going into engineering."