For Susan Scheer Aoki, the last decade and a half working with Cisco Systems Inc. has been more like working with dozens of startups.

“The company is very good at letting people try new things and encouraging new growth, so I have had a lot of opportunities to make an impact,” she said. “That attitude has kept up as the company expanded.”

Now the vice president of engineering at Cisco’s Internet Technologies division, located in Boxborough, Aoki is credited with being an integral team member in Cisco’s growth. Originally part of product marketing, she helped bring to market the 7200 Series Router, one of the company’s most successful enterprise products launched 10 years ago and still an integral part of its enterprise-routing product line.

But her sociological contributions mirror her technical prowess. Upon her arrival in Boxborough in 2003, she initiated and took on the role of executive sponsor for the New England chapter of Cisco’s Women’s Action Network (WAN). The program, which was started in California but quickly opened its second chapter in New England, is designed to assist in the professional development of women within Cisco, as well as help girls in high school and beyond explore careers in engineering.

Aoki, 42, acts as an ambassador for the program and spends a considerable amount of time managing internal initiatives, like a mentor program, and speaking outside the company to young women eager to learn about engineering.

Over the years, Aoki has navigated the acronym soup of networking with precision, moving through frame relay to asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) to Internet protocol (IP) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS).

As a product marketer, she was able to direct a given product’s capabilities, but as an engineer, she has been able to directly affect the direction of technology, and it is that influence that has kept her in the business.

“Technology has had dramatic impact on people’s lives, both personally and professionally, and I find that very exciting,” she said.

Aoki came to Massachusetts from the West Coast to lead Cisco’s MPLS initiative. MPLS, a switching protocol aimed at bridging the gap between earlier mechanisms and new protocols like IP, was originally created by the Cisco team in Boxborough, though it was called “tag switching” at the time. Under Aoki’s guidance, MPLS has become a focus for Cisco, with more than 300 deployments worldwide.

But she’s quick to point out she’s had help driving that growth and achieving success.

“There has been a quite a web of mentors, helping me in many different areas. I had a lot of mentors on a technical level, as well as ones that were organizational,” she said. “Mentors are very important (in general) and provide a quilt of experience from which to draw.”

Hopkinton-based EMC Corp.’s Janice Arcari is now in management. That means instead of technology solutions she focuses on people solutions.

Arcari was a math major in college who ended up in the software industry and who has found fulfillment by combining her passion for technology and desire to work with people. She’s now leading a team the includes 100 engineers and managers in EMC’s Clariion quality assurance division. Arcari, an experienced software developer, said having the lead management role allows for a fuller, more meaningful experience.

“In some ways that ends up being more challenging,” she said. “It’s really about figuring out that what may motivate one person doesn’t for another.”

That sensibility is patently Arcari, said Dana Richmond, EMC’s director of midrange software.

“She’s a very people-oriented person and someone who’s an advocate for her people,” she said.

Richmond, who has known Arcari for approximately eight years, said she is a rare bird in the technology industry — someone averse to territorial pettiness.

Arcari, 43, grew up in Pennsylvania. Her father was a mechanical engineer and that, she said, influenced her interest in mathematics and technology. She initially studied mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, but wound up earning a bachelor’s in computer science at Rochester Institute of Technology.

“(Math) was way too theoretical,” she said.

Before joining EMC nine years ago, Arcari worked as a software developer and manager at Data General, Stratus Computer Inc. and Prime Computer. Acari also previously managed an interoperability engineering group for EMC, to ensure third-party products would work properly with Clariion hardware and software.

Managing workers is difficult in any industry. But technology companies have greater challenge because of the constant possibility of mergers and acquisitions, Arcari said.

“It gives (employees) potentially a lesser feeling of security,” she said. “It certainly builds character, and from a management perspective you have to consider that.”

EMC officials say Arcari’s leadership abilities have extended out of the workplace and into the community. For example, she organized her department to raise funds for the Worcester County Food Bank.

Although the majority of her team’s members are male, Arcari said gender doesn’t play much of a role in here management decisions.

“Everyone should be considered on their own merit, not their gender,” she said. “In education and industry, the opportunities given to people should be based on skill and aptitude.”

Working as an engineer was not something Heather Blease aspired to as a young girl. In fact, it wasn’t until her junior year in high school, during a lunch discussion with her father about her future, when she began to seriously consider a career that relied on technical skills.

“I told him my favorite subject in school was art,” Blease recalls. “He said I was a great artist, but why not think about getting an engineering degree so I could support myself. I thought about it and realized it did make sense, that it would probably open doors for me.”

Blease went on to become the only woman to earn an electrical engineering degree in her graduating class at the University of Maine, but the decision to pursue engineering has had far more wide-reaching implications.

Blease has already founded one firm and is about to launch her second startup, Broadband Solutions Inc., taking aim at the exploding market for broadband technologies. Specifically, the firm will offer cable companies a product, known as Rocketap, that will help them provide very high-speed data access to commercial customers, including small and midsize businesses.

“It’s in the very early stages, but we’re finally getting there,” Blease says.

She hopes to announce a first round of funding for the firm before spring.

Blease, 42, credits her time at Digital Equipment Corp. with giving her a broad range of skills, and the confidence necessary to become an entrepreneur. There, she found role models and mentors and a corporate culture that enabled her to try new things and figure out how business and technology worked.

“It was a fabulous environment for women in a technical field,” she recalls. “There were women who were happy to mentor. It was a great company to grow up in because of their philosophies about education and equality in workplace. As I started a company, I tried to approach how we managed ourselves and our employees in the same way.”

Blease’s first startup was EnvisioNet, which she formed in 1995 and led to rapid growth of nearly 300 percent per year. The company, which provided Internet and technical support services for software developers, eventually became a victim of the dot-com bust.

Blease, who worked for Digital’s Augusta, Maine, facility and based EnvisioNet in Maine, also intends to locate her latest venture there. In fact, the Maine Technology Institute provided early funding.

For her part, Blease relished her time off between startups, which she spent mainly raising her four children. Now she’s back, drawing on her experience but with a renewed focus on the future.

“The technology is something that I was fortunate to have presented to me, and I can’t wait to see it gain traction,” she says. “Once something like this takes hold of you, you are ready to run with it.”

Suzette Braun saw herself in scrubs and a lab coat growing up — as did her aunts and uncles, most of whom are doctors.

But, for Braun, the love of math and science came naturally. “It was not a question that I’d go into engineering or be a science major,” said the Tufts University graduate, who just last month became director of strategic projects and process redesign for The Stop & Shop Supermarket Co.

Her role at the grocery company follows several years as senior manager of the Gillette Co.’s North American planning demand development group. In that role, Braun was baptized by fire: Just months into her job at the razor maker she was asked to replace her boss, who was laid off, to take over management of her team and to build the North America group from the ground up.

Internally, that meant several day-to-day IT projects such as designing a computer program and then helping the IT department build it, test it, train users and then deploy it.

In 2005, the executive managed more than 40 projects and handled more than 400 technical issues with Gillette’s internal-customer group.

As a full-time Tufts student, Braun worked 36 hours a week at Environet, an environmental consulting firm, and traveled to New Jersey and Washington, D.C., four to six times a year for the company. Part of her role at the company was to design a web site for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“I taught myself how to program in HTML, I came up with a design and the EPA liked the project and bought it,” Braun said. After a friend at Andersen Consulting, now Accenture, heard her story Braun was urged to apply to Andersen.

“It was an opportunity for me to be trained at one of the best places to learn management,” she said.

Some of her then-clients? EMC Corp., Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc., and Nike. In 1999, newly married, Braun earned the opportunity to lead EMC’s process improvements in the United States and Ireland, and things could not be better. Just a short time after her wedding, however, Braun was asked to live in Ireland for three to four months.

It was a choice between her career and her new life — and Braun moved to Ireland. But because life balance became a priority, Braun left Anderson and joined Gillette.

Now, life changes have crept up again: Braun, 40, wants to spend more time with her 9-month-old daughter, Campbell.

“Most women will not have any work-life balance and say, flat out, that it is impossible,” she said. “But I have been able to keep my work-life balance and move up in my job anyway.”

The daughter of schoolteachers, Karen Donoghue may have been expected to follow a path into academia.

Creativity and design, however, is part of Donoghue’s being. She considered a career in fashion design at one point. But she was also fascinated by figuring out how something worked and how to fix it — a clear sign of an engineer in the making.

So it was not a surprise when she followed in her engineer uncle’s footsteps and hit the books at Tufts University, hoping to combine her creativity with her interest in computers by becoming a computer animator or graphic designer. Donoghue’s mother, her inspiration, always encouraged her to do whatever she aspired to do. But role models didn’t end at the family tree.

Her first manager, Dr. Ken Milton of Bell Labs, had received his Ph.D. from MIT and encouraged Donoghue to do the same. After receiving her bachelor’s of science in computer science from Tufts in 1987, Donoghue decided the next step would have to be the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rather than the Fashion Institute of Technology.

“I felt like I had died and gone to heaven,” Donoghue said about her time at the MIT Media Lab, where she earned her master’s degree. Donoghue is now the senior interface design manager in the consumer experience design group at Motorola’s Mobile Devices division.

Prior to Motorola, Donoghue served as the lead designer at the fledgling Savaje Technologies in Chelmsford, where she was responsible for establishing a user experience practice for mobile devices. Prior to Savaje, Donoghue started Humanlogic, a consulting firm in Arlington where as principal she led client deals with customers such as BankAmerica and EMC Corp.

While at Humanlogic she also served as a board member of the MIT Enterprise Forum and organized an event called “Pitch and Polish” to provide feedback to MIT $50K contestants to help them pitch business plans to venture capitalists. She backed that with an all-night cram session dubbed “The Midnight Madness.”

“I have worked hard to empower and encourage young entrepreneurs, especially women,” she said.

Prior to launching Humanlogic, Donoghue also co-founded Network Sound & Light, a Cambridge software startup, and Donoghue/Halliday & Associates, a web design firm in Santa Monica, Calif.

Looking back, Donoghue says she had enjoyed all of the exposure she had in design but is content at the moment working to enable mobile device experiences on Linux, an open platform.

“I want to push the envelope of what is possible … and keep doing things for regular people to make them empowered in their home and work life.”

Ellen Ferraro, Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems’ deputy director of system validation, test and analysis, helps manage more than 1,000 employees involved in testing many of Raytheon Co.’s systems — from missile defense to radar and surveillance technologies.

She is also raising two daughters with her electrical engineer husband and in her “spare time” mentors young women inside Raytheon and outside the company who show an interest in engineering.

Since joining Raytheon in 1994, Ferraro has worked as a department manager in the Radar Systems Laboratory, where she oversaw about 80 engineers working on four major radar programs. Until 1997, she also served as a systems engineer for Raytheon’s Relocatable Over the Horizon Radar (ROTHR), which is in use in the National Counter Drug Strategy effort.

Before joining Raytheon, Ferraro, now 38, completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she also received undergraduate degrees in the same field. Among Ferraro’s career highlights, she said two things stand out: a NASA experiment in Greenland and mentoring successes.

Ferraro spent six weeks on a Greenland ice sheet. Sheltered only by tents, there was no heat or hot water while the team used radar and other sensors to measure the thickness of the ice sheet in a study about global climate change.

“I was proud to be part of this unique experiment,” she said. “Also, in general, when I mentor someone at Raytheon and they accomplish something great I feel as proud in that moment as I do in my own personal accomplishments.”

At the moment, Ferraro, 38, is mentoring 10 women in Raytheon’s Mentor Protégé Program. The company recently invited students from Lawrence High School to shadow engineers at the facility.

“To bring them in and let them see what we do, and that we love what we do, and that it’s a cool job — that can make a difference,” Ferraro said.

She remembers her own mentors from the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) who influenced her career.

“SWE laid the foundation for me on how to network with other women. I made it through some of the more challenging times as a student” because of SWE contacts, she said.

Ferraro has held many positions within SWE’s Boston chapter, including vice president of continuing development in 1995 and 1996.

Larisa Schelkin, who chairs the National Committee on Multicultural Engineering for SWE, said that Ferraro is instrumental in encouraging young children to learn math and science.

“She trusts and believes in each and every child — not only helping those standing out and talented. From the bottom of her heart she believes that each child is talented and each child is unique,” Schelkin said.

Ferraro said her daughters, ages 5 and 7, both love math. She and her husband spend time in the evening working out fun math games as a family.

Looking ahead, Ferraro said she plans to continue to grow into “more significant” leadership roles at Raytheon.

“I’m proud of what we do at Raytheon, Ferarro said. “The proudest part of it is building systems that save the lives of our military personnel.”

Linda Robeck Fuhrman, space science program manager for the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory Inc. in Cambridge, spent time as a child gazing at star-filled skies, like many of us. Unlike most of us, Fuhrman’s fascination with the sky and universe led her to a career in space science.

“My earliest memories are associated with the Apollo program, and watching solar eclipses in the back yard, looking at the moon and all kinds of astronomy and space kinds of things,” Fuhrman said.

It wasn’t until she was a college sophomore at MIT majoring in aeronautics and astronautics engineering that Fuhrman realized it was possible to become a space engineer. Following graduation in 1986, she delved deeper into the same discipline at Stanford University and received a master’s of science in 1987.

Today at Draper, Fuhrman is responsible for all space-related projects.

“I’m working on a concept to fly an airplane on Mars. No one has done that. I like trying to find solutions for really tough problems,” Fuhrman said.

Fuhrman has led proposals on several successful, high-profile projects for Draper from NASA since she joined in 2002, which have generated an estimated $20 million in revenue.

The projects include study that involved development of architecture systems for exploring Mars and the earth’s moon, and a conceptual design for the crew exploration vehicle that will replace the Space Shuttle after 2010.

Fuhrman, 42, says one of her most memorable days was July 4, 1997, when she was working at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. on the Mars Pathfinder mission.

“Getting the first picture from Mars from the Mars Pathfinder was a very risky and difficult mission,” she said. We were fully expecting something to go wrong and that this robot would have to figure out how to fix itself. But it landed, it opened up and we got a picture right away,” she said.

Fuhrman’s Pathfinder team discovered a problem with the spacecraft’s petals, used to allow the rover to exit the landing structure, during final assembly. The team redesigned the petals’ latches and replaced them before launch, and if that issue had gone undetected the rover wouldn’t have been released on Mars.

Fuhrman belongs to the Society of Women Engineers and the Association of Women in Science, and says she would like to see more women in space science.

“We need women to get inspired and come do high tech, because it is incredibly fun,” she said.

Fuhrman once considered a career as an astronaut, but decided the lifestyle was not up her alley even though space travel still looks appealing.

“If I got offered a ride, I might very well take them up on it.”

The “Six Million Dollar Man” helped steer Susie Kim Riley toward a career in engineering, where she’s spent the past decade helping to turn startups into billion-dollar companies.

“As I kid, it was my favorite show. I was fascinated by the technology and what role it played in the human environment,” says Riley, the founder and chief technology officer of Camiant Inc., a 3-year-old broadband technology firm based in Marlborough. She thought about being an astronaut, but motion sickness made her reassess her priorities.

“I took risks. I liked to push things to the very edge,” Riley said. Riley now has her latest company providing a novel technology for helping the likes of Comcast and overseas cable providers deliver more services over their networks.

“I never experienced obstacles in pursuing my interest in technology,” she says. “To me, it seems like, if you’re into something, if you really want to do something, there are no real obstacles.”

Still, Riley was one of relatively few women in the engineering program at Cornell University, and most of the women studying alongside her were preparing for law school or ended up with careers on Wall Street.

Riley, however, was drawn to the thrill of producing technology that others would use. Her first job involved building robotics to diagnose turbine engines. Later she moved to the Boston area to join Proteon Inc., which went on to develop several Internet traffic protocols before shutting its doors.

From there, she got her first taste of startup work when she became the first software person at Maker Communications, a firm that went public and was acquired by Connexant for $1 billion.

“It was a great experience, but also painful because of the 16-hour workdays, but the rewarding part was that the technology was being used,” she said. From there, she joined Broadband Access Systems, a more mature company that was bought for $2 billion.

Early in 2003, Riley found the opportunity she’d been looking for and set out to found Camiant. Her favorite part of the job is that the technology is brand-new. “It’s not a better version of something that already exists,” she says. “It’s very exciting to get an idea that started from scratch start to get some traction in large-scale deployments.”

Camiant chief executive Dave Paolino says Riley’s technical skills are matched by her business instincts.

Meanwhile, for her part, Riley is pleased by reports that more women are studying engineering today. She also feels the next generation of female engineers and entrepreneurs will have it a little easier.

Her 9-year-old daughter thinks technology is “okay,” but Riley knows she doesn’t lack for a role model. “There are more role models than when I was starting out,” she says. “To my daughter, a woman working in technology is no big deal because that’s what mommy does.”

When Regina Valluzzi attended MIT, she earned two undergraduate degrees: one in materials science and one in humanities. Both, she said, have helped her along an evolving career path that mingles technology and communication.

“The humanities gave me a second vocabulary,” said Valluzzi, a co-founder of Cambridge-based startup Evolved Nanomaterial Sciences (ENS). “Engineers tend to speak in a language known mostly to themselves, and I learned a lot by being in another discipline.”

Valluzzi, 39, is a native of Northport, N.Y. Her parents once owned a chain of book stores, and she spent much time helping them in the business. A high school teacher encouraged her to study math, which led her to MIT.

After graduation, she spent several years as an industrial researcher in the corporate research group at Akzo Chemicals, later Akzo-Nobel, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Her concentration was in emerging areas of molecular structure modeling and polymer process engineering, as well as providing input into technology transfer issues.

She later earned a Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Valluzzi recalls that during her research in fibrous protein and biopolymer structure and morphology, with professor Sam Gido, she became interested in the possible uses of polymers and biopolymers to self-assemble complex nanostructures in materials. In subsequent postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts Lowell with professor Sukant Tripathy, she further developed ideas about polymers, biopolymers and nanostructure.

Her stature in the rapidly developing field led to a staff position at Tufts University’s Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering. Valluzzi, 39, is on an extended leave of absence from Tufts, however, as she works to develop the company, though she still makes time to teach classes for hearing-imparied individuals.

ENS, founded in 2002, is a nascent advanced-materials enterprise focused on the discovery, fabrication and integration of biopolymers with nine full-time employees. The core technology platform can be the basis for many advanced applications, including chiral separations, filtration membranes and tissue engineering.

Industry observers say pharmaceutical companies could utilize chiral separation in the development of new medications, which opens a significant economic opportunity for ENS.

“I was a research professor, and I am not sure that the students enjoyed it,” said Valluzzi, chairman and chief scientific officer at ENS. “It often takes experience to present interesting classes. But I had gotten involved in the idea for a new company, and it’s hard to do a good job in teaching and (run) the company.”

Julianne Zimmerman is a woman who is interested in many aspects of life — and her identity is tied up in many of them.

She is an MIT alumna, engineer, literature buff, astronaut candidate, project manager, mentor, youth minister, certified emergency medical technician and clean energy pioneer — it’s easy to understand why.

“I’ve seen her in many roles, and I’ve seen her excel in them all,” said Stephen Drummey, president of the George S. Drummey Co., a contractor that has built cogeneration plants for Zimmerman’s current venture, GreenFuel Technologies Corp. “She’s a lot of fun and has a knack for motivating people. She made everybody (on the project) feel wonderful all the time.”

Zimmerman,38, is a co-founder of and director of business development at Cambridge-based GreenFuel, a developer of a system that uses algae to convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides from power plant emissions into biomass fuel.

“You take smokestack gases and pass the gas stream through a solution with the algae,” said Zimmermen, a Lebanon, Pa., native. “The algae consume 40 percent of the carbon dioxide and 86 percent of the nitrogen oxide, and you can harvest them daily.”

That’s all coming from a woman who grew up fascinated with space travel, earned bachelor’s degrees in aeronautical and astronautical engineering and literature from MIT, earned a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, was one of the first Americans to visit the Russian space launch site at Baikonur and was twice a finalist in the NASA astronaut-selection process.

So hers is not the average pedigree for a clean-energy pioneer, but her current foray does have it roots at spaceflight engineering company Payload Systems, where she met GreenFuel founder and chief technology officer Isaac Berzin, “who was sort of developing an idea for green fuel in the back of his mind,” Zimmerman said. With the support of Payload, GreenFuel took a runner-up prize at the 2002 MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition, and Zimmerman joined full-time two years ago. GreenFuel now employs 17 people.

Now she directs corporate communications with industry players, government entities, investors and customers, and she still puts on the engineer’s hat when the need arises.

With a lifetime’s worth of diverse experiences behind her, Zimmerman she says she’s focused on GreenFuel’s success, on making a significant change in how greenhouse gases are used, and on contributing in a unique way.

“I really feel the most excited when I’ve contributed something that’s missing. The greatest satisfaction is doing something that has real value. If I’m there and there’s somebody else there next to me that could do it, then I kind of lose interest.”