Today, Susan Adams is vice president of engineering for Comcast Corp.’s New England region, responsible for building and maintaining the cable operators’ video, voice and data network.

But as a child, Adams wasn’t pushed to study math and science. Quite to the contrary.

“I was discouraged,” Adams said. “Basically, it wasn’t something I was encouraged to pursue. I was good in English, so I was funneled that way.”

In fact, she didn’t even pursue college after graduating from high school. Instead, Adams sold real estate, managed restaurants and tended bar.

Nevertheless, college was always a goal.

“I’ve never considered myself terribly in need of power or title,” Adams said. “But on the other hand, I can tell you that when I tended bar, the lack of intellectual challenge was pretty frustrating.”

When she finally got to college, computers captured her imagination. And after taking a few computer classes, she got a job in the early 1990s with Hanscom Air Force Base, first upgrading 286 computers but eventually working her way up to network operations.

“Back then, if you had an inkling about how to install a hard drive and upgrade Windows, you could get a job,” Adams said.

When she entered graduate school at Bentley College, Adams wanted to study networking and, specifically, IP networks. She was enamored of their elegance and simplicity, she said.

She didn’t consider the cable industry until she took a networking class in early 1995 taught by professor John Gorgone.

“He said that the Internet was just starting to emerge as something that people wanted to use in a residential way, and he said that cable would make it available to people in their day-to-day lives,” Adams said.

A few weeks later, she got an interview with Continental Cablevision.

And unlike her childhood, at Continental (which later became AT&T Broadband until it was acquired by Comcast) she had plenty of mentors.

“Stephen Van Beaver was very instrumental in helping me realize my potential and go for positions I might not otherwise have gone for in 1998,” Adams said. “Kevin Casey, my current boss, has always been supportive, allowing me to make my own decisions, but someone I could also count on for guidance and support.”

Indeed, her accomplishments are many. Adams led the AT&T Broadband team of engineers that untangled the Road Runner high-speed cable network from Time Warner Cable and created the Roadrunner national support system of network engineers.

Going forward, her challenge is to build the underlying technology that will allow Comcast to keep the lead it has over the Baby Bells in residential DSL services, to continue the rollout of video-on-demand services, and to emerge as a serious competitor for voice services.

Asked what she’d have said if someone had told her while she was tending bar that in 2004 she’d manage a team of 400 and oversee Comcast’s engineering operations for New England, Adams didn’t miss a beat.

“I’d have probably said, ‘Cool.’”

Along with a bundle of math and science aptitude, Amy Duwel has another quality in abundance: Perspective.

Ask her for the biggest challenge she’s faced as woman in the world of scientific research and she says work-life balance, not obstacles to advancement. Asked if her 11-hour workdays seem long and she points to her husband, Dr. Carl Pallais, chief of residency at Mass General Hospital, as the one with the heavy workload.

And when pressed about her success, she cites the support from mentors, professors and co-workers as the key.

Duwel now leads the Micro Electrical Mechanical Sensors group at Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT. In her almost 10 years at MIT — five in academia and about four and a half at Draper — she has notched three fellowships, published almost a half-dozen works based on her research and served in several international teaching positions.

Her work on a tiny tuning fork gyroscope has resulted in a 2-cubic-inch inertial guidance system the military will buy from Honeywell. She’s been credited with breakthroughs in radio frequency MEMS, which will be used for high-frequency switching in electronic circuits, and an all-glass fabrication process for a chip-scale atomic clock. She holds three patents in the MEMS field.

Duwel says she landed in the MEMS field as the result of a quest for more applied science rather than pure research. She arrived there after a winding path that started with her sights aimed high — literally.

“I went to Johns Hopkins because they had a telescope and worked with NASA and I wanted to be an astronomer,” she says.

It was at Hopkins that she met her first mentor, Andreas Andreu, who suggested she switch her major to electrical engineering, which she did.

“He said ‘You need to come work with me.’ He was very enthusiastic, very supportive.”

When she hit a financial crisis, “He pushed me hard not to go to a community college. It’s really important having an adult say to you ‘You’re going to make this happen.’ ”

Andreu wasn’t the only one supporting Duwel, the second of seven children of a doctor and a schoolteacher/stay-at- home mother.

“They definitely supported my enthusiasm for math and science. There were science fair projects that my dad would drive me hours to meet some professor. They were very generous in supporting my interest in science.”

Since then, academia has been a good place for Duwel as a budding scientist, researcher, and now, at Draper, leader of a team of 35, about half of whom have Ph.D.s.

As for women’s issues, Duwel in some ways followed in the footsteps of some pioneers, and has benefited.

“My entire experience in terms of gender has been nothing but supportive,” she says. “When I got accepted at MIT, I asked, ‘Did you accept me because I’m a woman?’ And they said, ‘No, but we do have some special scholarships for you,’” she says with a laugh.

But it’s still not a completely level playing field.

“The first real issue I ever faced were the choices. In the professional world, the questions around how to balance family and career become huge. There are not a lot of role models.”

From here, Duwel’s goals are simple. “I want to stay focused on being a better scientist. I want to learn more things, and deeper. In MEMS in particular. No one’s burning out on it yet. It still seems like a wide open space.

“I do feel very welcome at Draper, and in the field. This is a very exciting time.”

Jana Eggers refers to herself as the “black sheep” of her family because she was the only one to pursue an education in mathematics and computer science.

“I was sent to school to become an accountant or lawyer,” she says. “I didn’t tell my family until my junior year that I was majoring in math. They wanted to know, What do people do with a math degree?”

What Eggers did with her degree was put it to work in development roles at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Princeton Transportation Consulting Group, Lycos Inc., Sabre Inc., Apps.com and Basis Technology Corp. For the most part, all small organizations — when Lycos grew to 700 people, she moved on, saying, “I missed the small-company feel.”

So what is she doing at Intuit Inc., a 7,000-employee company?

Running two small businesses.

Working in Intuit’s Waltham office, Eggers is general manager of the Innovation Lab, where her team takes projects considered too risky by the business unit and fine-tunes and develops them in what she calls a “completely customer-focused” process.

She is also in charge of the QuickBase product, a web-based workgroup application solution that combines database, groupware and business management applications in a single platform.

It sounds like a lot of work tacked on to a 45-minute to hour-long commute from her home in Londonderry, N.H.

But now add the fact that she and her husband run their own company as well. They founded 02Cruise.com in 1999 out of their passion for going on cruises. They self-financed the online cruise-only travel agency and have developed strategic partnerships with several cruise lines.

How does she manage it all?

“Some days it’s about survival,” she says, laughing.

But Eggers credits the women in her family with showing her the meaning of strength. For example, in 1910, her great-grandmother on her father’s side kicked her alcoholic husband out of the house. With a 2-year-old daughter to support, she went to work at AT&T and became one of the company’s first female regional executives. She worked at the phone giant for 50 years.

Eggers’ grandmother on her mother’s side was sent to a sanitarium when it was found she had tuberculosis, and suffered through a mastectomy because of breast cancer while she was there.

And Eggers’ mother, who switched careers from nursing to retail buying, taught her to follow her passions.

“I’m so lucky to have some very strong women examples to follow,” she says.

And now the mentoring tradition is passed to Eggers, who according to a former colleague has already started internship programs and has served as a mentor.

According to Ben Levitan, CEO of EnvoyWorldWide in Bedford, “My observation is that as someone who has served in business and marketing management and having been a research scientist and IT scientist, Jana understands the importance of mentor-based development.

“She’s work-hard, play-hard, but she understands the bigger cycle of how leadership happens, that research matters, mentors matter and results matter.”

In 1999, Dawn Fitzgerald and her husband, Brian, co-founded Waltham-based Chipwrights with the aim of developing the world’s fastest digital signal processors for image processing in handheld devices.

As the vice president of engineering, Dawn has the job of making sure the chips deliver. Four years and $30 million in venture capital financing later, it looks as if they may have succeeded.

SMaL Camera of Cambridge, for instance, has designed Chipwrights’ silicon into its upcoming security and surveillance products. And Fitzgerald said the company has landed deals with larger camera manufacturing companies, though they haven’t been announced.

But people who knew her as a child would probably not be surprised by Fitzgerald’s current success. She grew up in a home where math and science were part of the family.

“My mother had an influence on me, certainly,” Fitzgerald said. “She’s a biology professor in the State University of New York system at Monroe Community College in the Rochester (N.Y.) area. I grew up with math and science all around me.”

When she entered Monroe Community College, she quickly became interested in the guts of computer systems.

“What was beyond the NAND gate? How does that physically happen, I wondered,” Fitzgerald said. “I understood it logically but needed to also understand it physically.”

So when she continued her education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she focused on microchips.

RPI opened doors for Fitzgerald. She worked with a Ph.D. candidate to research silicon-rich oxides and as part of a co-op worked on chip designs for the space shuttle program at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif.

Partly on the strength of these experiences, Fitzgerald got her first chip design job at IBM Corp., where she worked on 286 and 386 microprocessors.

But at IBM, she learned more than just processor design.

“I saw some designs that were just OK that did well with customers, and others that were great that flopped,” Fitzgerald said. “Why?”

To answer that question, she entered MIT’s Leaders for Manufacturing Program, in which she earned both an M.S. in electrical engineering and an MBA.

From her years at MIT, Fitzgerald took away two big lessons: the importance of clearly understanding the market need before designing the product, and the importance of having the right balance between process and freedom.

“Too much process and you implode,” Fitzgerald said. “Too little, and you implode.”

She had an opportunity to put these lessons into practice at Motorola Inc., where Malik Kahn selected her for the executive rotation program.

In this program, Fitzgerald spent nine to 12 months in different roles within the organization, everything from strategic marketing for the international product launch of a Frame Relay device, to managing an engineering team on a soft modem project.

“It was extremely valuable,” Fitzgerald said. “As an engineer, you rarely have the experience of a customer saying, ‘This really isn’t going to cut it for me.’ ”

Now that she’s helped steer her startup through the technology collapse to the other side, her next big challenge is growth.

“They’re the standard challenges of a growth economy,” she said. “Hiring, managing production, all those things which are good problems to have.”

She’s an accomplished technologist who skydives. In just a dozen years in business, she already holds a patent for technological design, with another pending, but she also likes to get outdoors and rollerblade, whitewater raft and ski. She’s charitable with her time as a mentor, is devoted to her bungee-jumping husband and “passionate” about working with their special-needs daughter.

Reema Gupta’s career began in 1992, when she went to work at EMC Corp. as a Northeastern University co-op student. Unlike other companies where she did co-op work, at EMC Gupta was given part of an actual project to work on that would later go to market. And even though there were 2,000 people on the payroll at the time, there was a startup buzz in the air.

Gupta was smitten.

“We worked late nights making sure everything was right, but you didn’t feel it. It was a great team environment,” she says. “That kind of extended my stay here.”

And it must have been a great match, because not only does Gupta remain working at EMC, she’s now senior director of engineering, storage platforms operations, for the storage giant. It’s the only company she’s worked for, and her devotion is evident when she describes very long days and her view of co-workers as like family.

“As the company grew, the opportunity for people who are capable has grown,” she says.

Gupta has achieved growth and seized opportunities at EMC, in part with her 1999 patent for her design of nonhierarchical interface application programs and another patent pending for her work on the messaging mechanism for interprocessor communication.

She’s held a series of engineering positions in both software and hardware development. The cross-functional team she currently leads for integrating cost optimization into design and manufacturing has already saved EMC $154 million.

Gupta was also a team leader for a group that was responsible for development and support of common driver firmware used within the Symmetrix Microcode organization, as well as diagnostic software and applications for manufacturing.

In addition to her work, Gupta has mentored numerous co-workers during the launch of EMC products and is a member of EMC’s Women’s Leadership Forum.

Asked to cite her greatest influence, Gupta honors her mother, Dr. Basant Gupta, a physician still living in India.

“She’s very outgoing and also very scientific,” Gupta says. “She has a scientific explanation for everything, but she also gets very excited about life. She’s taught me to get excited about the small things.”

“Lots of hard work and lots of good, good people around you,” is the key to success, says Julie LeMoine.

And she should know. Since graduating from the University of Maine at Orono in 1986, she’s built a formidable resume. A single day after graduating with a double degree in math and computer science, LeMoine landed a job where she was asked to work on computer security development half of the time.

“No one went into computer security,” she says. “It was a dark art at the time.”

Eighteen years later, she’s still making sure government and business applications are secure as the founder, president and CEO of U C How. The company’s technology bundles information security and collaborative technology into a real-time product that she has branded IDEServer.

And while the technology has yet to go to market, Forrester Research chose to feature it last fall as one of 30 outstanding and emerging technologies.

Before founding U C How, LeMoine was a director for Concept Five (C5) Technologies, an e-business solutions company that she also founded. She built C5’s first million-dollar account from the ground up in less than 12 months. This while managing a staff of 30 people and developing technical partnerships with Hitachi, Compaq, Iona and others.

But LeMoine left C5 because she felt she wasn’t being formally recognized for her achievements.

“I had been leading the part of the company making the most money,” she says. “It was time to be in the boardroom.”

Prior to Concept Five, LeMoine worked in Mitre’s research and development department on early security protocols for the Arpanet/Internet. She also developed firewall technology and IP packet filtering algorithms there.

“I spent 10 years at Mitre working with so many amazing minds,” she says. “There, knowledge isn’t power unless it’s shared. It’s so forward.”

Before Mitre, LeMoine worked for Ford Aerospace in secure software development and information security for the U.S. government. She arrived early and stayed late. And she whistled as she was coming and going.

LeMoine started U C How three-and-a-half years ago with more than $2 million in customer funds and no venture dollars, though she’s starting to take meetings. She recently gave her 10-minute pitch to venture capitalists at the Technology Capital Network at MIT, and says she was the only female presenter there. But that’s not news to her.

“A couple of years ago when we were putting feelers out, I presented to a venture capital firm that said, ‘You are very good at this. We never see women like you.’ ”

In addition to looking to raise money, LeMoine is preparing to go to market. She says she has selected the four best people she ever worked with to join her team and is now “sitting at the moment of commercialization.”

“What I’m really looking forward to is the move out into commercialization,” she says. “We’re on a very razor-thin edge right now.”

She’s also in the midst of developing her advisory board, while getting advice from the Commonwealth Institute’s eMerging Women Entrepreneurs committee.

“I’m getting wonderful advisement through their steering committee. They’re amazing.”

It sounds cliché to say that Fanny Mlinarsky — computer programmer, electrical engineer, entrepreneur and founder-CTO of Azimuth Systems — has come a long way since she was a little girl with an interest in electronic gadgets.

In fact, it’s the literal truth.

Mlinarsky, a native of Odessa, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union, immigrated with her family to Israel, to France, and to New York before coming north to Boston.

Twenty-seven years after arriving in the United States, she founded Azimuth Systems Inc., an Acton maker of wireless data communication testing products, having helped create a number of successful startups along the way.

“I always wanted to start a company, but that can be difficult to do because whatever idea you might come up with, you look around and find that somebody’s already done it,” Mlinarsky said.

As it turns out, that wasn’t a problem. Mlinarsky joined the wireless LAN race with an idea for a standardized, repeatable test platform to measure performance of and ensure confidence in wireless networks.

“There are a lot of problems with testing wireless equipment,” Mlinarsky said. “We refined it into something very different from the testing equipment available.”

Azimuth’s W-Series WLAN Test Platform, which shipped in September, has proved popular with customers and was named “Best of Show” in Test/ Measurement at Jupiter Media’s Wi-Fi Planet Exhibition held in San Jose in December.

But for Mlinarsky, it almost didn’t happen.

Having arrived in New York at 15, she steered away from science when she entered Columbia University three years later. But her curiosity got the better of her, and after her first computer science course, she was hooked. She earned degrees in computer science and electrical engineering and headed to Wall Street as a programmer.

When her interest in software faded, Mlinarsky headed to Teradyne Inc. in Boston as a hardware designer.

Subsequent experiences with a string of startups — among them a fledgling Chipcom Corp. — helped her evolve from hands-on engineer to adept businesswoman, having gained experience in strategy, decision-making, industry standards, writing and presentation. Her last stop, at Scope Communications, helped sow the seeds of Azimuth.

“Scope was my best exposure to the outside and to customers, which is what you have to do,” she said. “A lot of technical people might have a problem with that. But just talking with the folks who might be using the system is a very important part.”

When Scope was acquired by Hewlett-Packard and spun off as Agilent Technologies, she took over as general manager and later set off on her own.

“I spent a few months investigating and looking for a market because I wanted to make sure I was getting involved in a technology that was solving a problem, rather than coming up with a solution and then trying to find the problem.”

When she settled on LAN testing, she landed $5.8 million in funding from Kodiak Venture Parters and Northbridge Venture Partners — and at a time when funding for startups was virtually nonexistent.

“Getting started in a down market is an advantage because you can get some top people,” she said. “We have a super team that we’ve built here.”

Her home team includes her husband and son. And while she makes sure there’s time for both her 3-year-old son and her 2-year-old company, she said, “It’s like having two babies.”

Suja Ramnath has a degree in engineering, but her wide array of skills has put her in a management position in which she supervises the work of close to 250 people.

Ramnath is manager of the IC Products group at M/A-Com Inc., a division of Tyco International.

M/A-Com is a supplier of radio frequency, microwave and millimeter wave semiconductors, components and IP networks to the wireless telecommunications and defense-related industries.

It’s a position that requires her to sign off not only on the products of today but to plan for what will be needed in coming years.

“We’re always thinking several years out,” said Ramnath, a 1991 graduate of Northeastern University. “Many of our decisions aren’t based on what will happen in 2004 but sometime in 2006.

“It’s a fast-changing field, and if you are thinking of next-generation products you must think ahead.”

Ramnath is a native of Lake Carmel, N.Y. She recalls that as a child she was always trying to figure out how things worked.

On a trip to her grandparents’ home in India, she not only was intrigued by an explanation of how their television worked but wanted to build one herself.

She picked up valuable skills at Northeastern and then applied them in her first job at RF Micro Devices, based in North Carolina.

Ramnath has been with M/A-Com for close to five years and has moved up rapidly at the Lowell site.

Tech professionals who know her say she is not only a good engineer but also a skillful manager.

Karen Panetta, a colleague who teaches engineering at Tufts University, says that Ramnath can see the opportunity in almost any business situation.

“One of her most recent accomplishments was developing the SiGe (silicon germanium) and GaAs (gallium arsenide) processes at M/A-Com for manufacturing RF (radio frequency) components for communications equipment.

“Suja recognized that if products could be built from these materials, the performance and speed of the devices manufactured would far exceed the best products on the market.

“Within a year of M/A-Com’s first investigation of this material, Suja’s product group produced over $12 million in profit.”

In addition to succeeding on the job, Ramnath has served as a mentor to many women and minority students from Tufts, Boston University, UMass-Lowell and MIT.

Those who know her mentoring work say she is accessible, and always willing to help.

And colleagues say she is an approachable manager who puts in much effort to advocate for women in engineering.

Though she says that only about 7 percent of her class at Northeastern were women, she’s hopeful that will change.

“There’s a relatively small window for women in technology,” Ramnath said. “The ones who are in the field are often in support positions, often in marketing.

“But there are opportunities here, and I am hopeful that that the low ration of women engineers can improve in the future.”

Commitment and perseverance are the words Weng Tao chooses to describe what has made a difference in her career. That becomes more understandable when the story of her company’s technology is explained.

She went to work as director of cell research for CytoTherapeutics in Providence, R.I., in 1996. Tao was intrigued with its work in encapsulated cell technology (ECT) to treat retinal degenerative diseases such as macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma.

“In my view, I thought this technology was very clever,” she says. “It delivers the drug directly to the target site in the eye. It has both genetic engineering and cell biology. Everything I ever learned is in this technology.”

But Tao says the company was poorly managed and went out of business in 1999. About six months before it closed, she started looking for a new home for ECT.

“I thought, What can I do to decide my own destiny?” she says.

She says she believed passionately in the science and knew that it could work.

“It’s good science, but I’ve learned that cannot be the only thing. You must have not only good science but a good management team and financial support. You must have all three.”

Tao found this hat trick of elements in Neurotech S.A., a Paris-based company developing novel therapeutics for the eye. Tao was able to negotiate her position as vice president of research and development, to hire back her original team and to locate the U.S. division working on ECT in Lincoln, R.I., near her home. It officially opened on Jan. 17, 2000.

But that wasn’t the end of her battle. The company struggled to move the science forward as the U.S. division went through four CEOs, a complete management change, and two rounds of layoffs while looking for financial support.

Though cancellation of the ECT project was threatened all along the way, Tao’s persistence and determination won out. The device, which is implanted in the eye, is now in Phase I clinical trials and has been implanted in four patients. The fifth and final patient received the implant on Feb. 18, just one day before Tao was honored as a Mass High Tech Woman to Watch.

“When I saw the device implanted for the first time, all the heartaches I had suffered to make this technology happen washed away,” she says.

But the hard work is not over.

“We have to go through clinical development for safety,” Tao says. “I feel good about it, but no one can say if our success now will be mirrored in the clinic.”

Then there’s the issue of raising money to continue development.

“It takes so much risk to get people to put money in,” Tao says. “I have to work hard this year to raise awareness in the investment community.”

Yet for everything she has gone through to make this technology happen, she is grateful for doing something that she loves.

“My passion is to bring something to the patient. I don’t consider this to be work.”

When Mary Ellen Zurko was growing up in Milford, Conn., she was placed in advanced classes with many gifted math students.

She thrived, and has since gone on to earn two degrees from MIT and land top jobs at the top technology corporations in the region.

Now a senior technical staff member at IBM Software Group, she has demonstrated that much is possible for women who chose technology.

“I grew up with a lot of bright, obnoxious guys,” said Zurko, who works out of the Westford office of the company. “So at MIT and at work, I was prepared for anything.

“I will say at IBM there is a positive culture for women, and advancement is based on merit. I don’t have a concern about sexism here.”

After finishing high school as class valedictorian, Zurko went on to MIT, graduating in 1982. She then worked for close to a decade and went back to MIT in the early ’90s, earning a master’s degree there in 1992.

Zurko held positions with Digital Equipment Corp., Prime Computer and the Open Group Research Institute before taking a senior post at IBM.

She has been with the global giant for more than five years and currently serves as a security architect for Lotus brand workplace products.

“We work toward the end of the cycle, and directly with many of the users,” said Zurko, who supervises about a dozen engineers and technicians.

“Customers are much more attentive to security these days, and I like working directly with users to make sure the products are operating effectively.”

Terri Warren, a colleague and software engineer at IBM, said about Zurko, “She is an innovator who focuses on solving difficult customer security problems by delivering usable, deployable and highly secure solutions.

“It is through Mary Ellen’s leadership that IBM and Lotus products are recognized throughout the high tech industry as providing both useful and usable security features.”

Outside the office, Zurko pursues numerous interests. One is Shakespearean plays. Once an amateur actor, she now travels throughout New England to see stage presentations.

Other interests include tarot cards and pysanky, the art of Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Zurko is involved in numerous professional groups, including the International World Wide Web Conference and the New Security Paradigm Workshop, an invitation-only group that studies innovative breakthroughs in security.

She has participated in programs supporting women, including Women in IBM Leading Massachusetts (WILMA) and the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event.

Colleagues say she has acted as a mentor to many young engineers in each position she has held.

Zurko is optimistic about women’s opportunities in technology.

“Women can be successful but in terms of the big picture, it varies,” she said. “The fact that there is no celebrated equivalent to an Einstein shows that more work has to be done.

“There are clusters of men at every company but from my experience, women can move forward.”