She earned her first scientific “stripes” with her doctoral thesis addressing the problem of simultaneous use of mobile telephony channels by multiple users, which she completed at the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University in 1989. Scheiterer pursued her undergraduate studies at the Technische Universität München, where she was one of six women in her class of 600. Mathematics was always her favorite subject – she won the German National High School Mathematics Competition three times as a schoolgirl – and electrical engineering enabled her to combine the “queen of sciences” with practical application.

However, she also wanted a big family in addition to a challenging career. “This is much easier if you have skills that are attractive to employers,” she explains. After obtaining her doctorate, she returned to Germany in 1989 and joined Siemens CT in Munich in the field of machine learning. She worked on algorithms that use failure data in power grids to automatically derive rules for a diagnostic system.

Two years later, Scheiterer followed her husband to Silicon Valley, where he also worked for Siemens. She had three children and devoted all of her attention to them. “During that period, I followed the literature and reviewed scientific publications in my area of expertise,” she reports. This enabled her to immediately rejoin CT when the family returned to Munich in 1998, initially in the area of optimization and diagnosisof mobile telephony networks. Scheiterer took another year off in 2004 following the birth of her fourth child. After that she worked on optimization of equipment placement in fiber-optic networks and on clockwork synchronization of Profinet. “The secure VPN links between the company and my office at home have made it much easier to combine having a family with having a career,” she says. The research team benefits too, because “I can also work at unusual hours, if the project requires it.”

At first she researched how to optimize the system architecture of fiber-optic networks, and she has spent the last four years researching precisetime synchronization for Profinet. Scheiterer devotes a portion of her precious free time to the development of young people. She heads a mathematics work group at Geretsried High School and is a mentor for the Siemens Young Ladies Network of Technology (Yolante) at the University of the Bundeswehr (armed forces) and with the German National Academic Foundation. She tries to pass on the things she has found to be the keys to success in life: taking responsibility, being able to cope with stress, and continuously improving one’s personal abilities.