When Afsana Akhter became business development director at Medullan Inc., a Cambridge health-care IT startup, the young sales engineer who had arrived from a job across town in technical sales with a network management firm had not been an obvious choice.

But what’s special about Akhter is that she’s a born impresario who inspires highly diverse teams of software engineers and clients to build websites in the new world of consumer-owned health care.

“I like working on the front lines,” she said. “My role is to find great applications and build systems in a highly collaborative way.”

Her talent is essential for IT projects in health care, where decisions are made by large committees. Take, for instance, her first big project with Medullan, a wellness portal developed for employees of Partners Healthcare under its Center for Connected Health.

Akhter led fitness instructors, nutritionists, cardiologists, third-party vendors and others to build a website for employees to keep weekly exercise and food logs and activity charts, along with the possibility of winning prizes for reaching health goals. Employees use pedometers to track daily walking.

“The theory is that if you can measure it, you can improve it,” Akhter said.

Another of her projects for the Massachusetts Healthcare Quality and Cost Council is a public website to help consumers compare the quality of care and costs at area hospitals.

“I am passionate about getting information into the hands of consumers so they can play an active part in their health,” she said.

Next she wants to develop telehealth applications that allow patients with diabetes and chronic conditions, for instance, to monitor their vital signs.

A simple interface trumps bells and whistles, she said.

“Sometimes even the most basic solutions are the best. It’s not about whiz-bang technology, but how to use basic technology to produce a wide impact,” she said.

Akhter made the transition from engineering to sales in her first job at Cisco Systems Inc., where she was hired as an engineer in voice over Internet protocol (VoIP).

At Mazu Networks Inc., where she served as its first sales engineer, she built a 10-person technical sales team and groomed it to be self-led. At Cisco Systems she supported design and deployment of voice over IP (VoIP) products for service providers.

Born in Bangladesh and raised both there and in the United States, Akhter wound up at MIT as a college freshman. She keeps ties with MIT as a career adviser to the Bangladeshi Students Association.

“It offers me a taste of my home culture, and I provide mentoring,” she said.

She has also served on the board of Indus Women Leaders, an organization to empower South Asian women leaders. And she serves in a community health organization in Bangladesh that trains young women as birthing assistants.

Instead of working for someone else, Wendy Frey Caswell is focusing her energy and drive on her own company. She has been the president and CEO of Zink Imaging Inc. since founding it in October 2005. She has been involved in every aspect from finalizing the products to recruiting partners.

Zink stands for zero ink. Instead of using ink held in cartridges, Zink’s printing system uses colorless dye crystals embedded into a special photo paper with a protective polymer overcoat. Heat from the printer activates the crystals, releasing the colors that make the images.

“This is our year,” Caswell said. “After lots of research and working with our partners, we are bringing our product to the market. We are focused on delighting our customers with these products.”

Caswell, who has more than 20 years under her tech belt, worked as executive vice president of corporate strategy and business development for Polaroid Corp. prior to starting Zink. While with Polaroid, she also co-led the sale of the company to Petters Group Worldwide.

Before accepting a position with Polaroid, Caswell co-founded Ammasso Inc., a venture-funded company that develops Ethernet-based networking interconnect products for the computing industry. Prior to that, she worked with 15 global technology companies to launch Converge Inc. She also has experience as vice president of corporate strategy at Compaq Corp., where she led a team focused on strategy initiatives, business acquisitions, new business incubation and strategy communications. Prior to Compaq, she held several positions with Digital Equipment Corp. before becoming its vice president of corporate strategic planning.

Now, after more than $200 million invested and eight years of research and development in Zink’s technology, 2008 will be the first year its products will be for sale.

Caswell announced in January that Polaroid, TOMY Co. Ltd., Foxconn Technology Group and ALPS will be the company’s first partners. The first product from Polaroid is a digital instant mobile printer that enables wireless printing from camera phones and digital cameras.

“There is nothing like creating a great company from scratch,” Caswell said. “It gives tremendous pride and enormous satisfaction to take something from the genesis of the idea and bring it to life. We want to employ the best and the brightest to have fun and do good work.”

Business aside, Caswell says her biggest accomplishment has been raising her 27-year-old daughter, now a schoolteacher in Burlington, Vt.

“No matter what, you should do whatever you want,” she said. “There is always a path that will get you there. It may not be easy and it may not be quick but I think everyone has a destiny, especially with their careers.”

Sylvie Grégoire may have been born to lead an international biotech. Growing up in Canada, her family spoke both English and French at home. And with her mother and grandfather in the medical profession, she wondered at an early age how drugs work.

“There’s an immense satisfaction to see the evolution of a (pharmaceutical) product from early on,” said Grégoire, “To see the outcome of the product in patients is immensely satisfying.”

Yet Grégoire didn’t think she would become a biotech executive when she began her studies in pharmacology, nor when she completed a doctorate in the field. But now, with 20 years of experience in the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, she heads British drug firm Shire PLC’s Human Genetic Therapies unit in Cambridge.

The big job requires Grégoire, 46, to oversee an enterprise in both the United States and Europe, where she had spent much of her career with large life sciences firms such as Biogen Idec Inc. and Merck & Co. Inc. (In fact, she joined Biogen in 1995 and worked in Paris to launch its operations in Europe and help the firm to garner European approval of its multiple sclerosis drug Avonex.)

Shire hired Grégoire to be president of its HGT unit in the second half of 2007, putting her in charge of one of the multibillion-dollar company’s fastest-growing businesses. The HGT unit — formerly Transkaryotic Therapies Inc. before Shire bought the business in 2005 — markets a drug called Replagal in Europe for Fabry disease and Elaprase in the U.S. and European markets to treat Hunter syndrome.

Less than a year into her new job, Gregoire has already helped Shire land a major deal with New Jersey biotech Amicus Therapeutics Inc., giving the HGT unit rights to market three potential drugs from Amicus in Europe. “Keeping the pipeline full of (treatments) that are valuable to patients is important,” she emphasized.

Grégoire has often found herself as the only woman on company boards or executive teams, but she said her gender has had no bearing on her ability to succeed in the life sciences industry (except, she said, in conversations among her male colleagues about baseball).

Grégoire now keeps offices at the HGT facilities in both Cambridge and in Lexington, where HGT said last month it would invest $394 million to expand and add 680 jobs to its current work force of 675 people in Massachusetts over the next eight years.

On her way to leading one of the largest life sciences operations in the state, Grégoire is also one half of a biotech “power couple” of sorts. Her husband, John Alam, is chief medical officer of another well-known, growing Bay State biotech: Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc.

“(The biotech industry) is obviously a passion of his and mine,” Grégoire said. “He is a physician by training. It’s a combined interest of ours.” But as executives of public companies, there are limits to their shop talk. “We obviously do not talk in detail about what we’re doing,” she added.

Sadiye Guler is a woman of vision. (And while that’s probably a quality shared by all the Women to Watch honorees, in her case it’s a bit more literal.)

Guler, a 20-year veteran of video technology, is the founder, president and CEO of intuVision Inc., a developer of video content extraction technologies that turn video into analyzable, searchable data for security, surveillance and investigation purposes. In short, it’s a technology that’s a long way from your home movies.

Growing up in Ankara, Turkey, Guler wanted to be an architect but steered toward engineering in high school. “I’m very visual. I like drawing, and in my mind (architecture) was the closest thing to math and art,” she says. “I took courses (in high school) that led me toward electrical engineering. And in graduate school I was inclined more toward computer engineering. I guess that visual inclination took me more toward video.”

Guler was working on her Ph.D. at Middle East Technical University when she was invited to MIT as a visiting scientist, where she worked on using images to detect fault zones, and later finished her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She continued working on image processing at a small, now-defunct startup in New Hampshire. “That’s where I got the startup bug. It was a fun, informal environment, a place where you could bring ideas to conclusion.”

Her next step came at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, where Guler was manager and chief scientist of the Advanced Video Technology group and helped establish intelligent video technology as an emerging business area. But after eight years, she left to pursue a longtime goal in founding intuVision.

“From that small company that I once worked at, I had this idea,” she said. “A lot of people are afraid to go out on their own, but I’m not one of them. And it seemed like the logical thing to do even though they told me I was crazy.”

“They” probably don’t think that now. The 2-year-old intuVision has released event-detection and video-analysis products and sold some licenses, Guler says, and has a strong sense of a future that keeps evolving.

“There are many open problems involving video content, and the technology is advancing day to day so it’s not like all problems are solved,” she said. “We’re working on things today while working toward the technology of tomorrow. We need more research and more answers. We can’t just release a product and sit here and collect royalties.”

Guler lives not far from intuVision’s Woburn headquarters with her husband and two children and says intuVision represents the crown jewel of her career so far. But like the technology in an increasingly security-conscious world, that could change.

“I’d say (my top achievement) starting intuVision because I really feel passionately about the technology and what we’re able to offer,” she said. “If you asked me a few years back it would be getting my Ph.D., but it’s funny how perspectives change.”

After two decades and five companies in the technology industry, Heather Healy has plenty of reasons to be proud. But one thing the senior director of strategic planning for EMC Corp. isn’t satisfied with is a continued lag when it comes to the numbers of women working in the tech sector.

Healy, who competes in triathlons, readily acknowledges that the race to encourage young women to pursue careers in technology has yet to be won.

“I would be proud to be an example that it’s working,” she said. “But if you look at enrollment of women in engineering, it looks like it’s on the decline. There are certainly more role models for women considering technology careers, but organizations still need to strengthen their diversity efforts.”

In addition to mentoring young women, both outside and within EMC, Healy was part of group that initiated a program for university interns at EMC’s facility in Cork, Ireland, to exchange places with Northeastern University interns to give the interns global experience, she said.

For Healy, 40, a burning interest in technology started in high school and has withstood untold changes to the industry.

Meanwhile, her own interest shifted from software programming to product management, a job that itself has changed drastically in recent years.

A surge in “connectivity,” or the ease in which information is exchanged, combined with the rise in general access to data has affected the way products are designed and developed, Healy said.

The process is more collaborative — and more complicated — than years ago. Technology is developed with input from many different perspectives (researchers, universities and partners) and then vetting ideas with customers, she said.

“It certainly makes it much more exciting,” Healy said. “The individuals you might be working with … the talent you can pull into looking at a problem area really expands. You need to be at the top of your game to participate in these conditions.”

Healy, a Chelmsford native, has competed as a runner in several local road races and completed the Danskin Sprint Triathlon in 2006 in Webster.

The Hopkinton-based EMC is Healy’s fifth technology company. After she studied management of information systems at University of Massachusetts Lowell, she spent six years at Digital Equipment Corp. in Nashua, N.H.

Later at Oracle Corp., Healy shifted gears from development to product management and quality assurance.

“I was more drawn to the business reasons why we’re doing something,” she said.

After three years in the late 1990s as product management director for Gensym Corp., a Texas software company, Healy spent three years at EMC. She returned to EMC in 2003 after a one-year stint at Acopia Networks Inc., a Lowell-based software company.

Deborah Louis has seen the view from just about every step of the corporate ladder during her fruitful career — and she has continued that climb at Authoria Inc.

Louis was promoted to senior vice president of global operations for Waltham-based Authoria in November 2007 — another promotion in a long line of advances she has made by taking challenges head on.

“I love big challenges. If I know nothing about something, I see it as a great opportunity to learn, and I dive in,” said the 56-year-old Weston resident.

Louis was recruited to Authoria, which creates software that tracks employees from the recruiting phase throughout their business life cycle, in 2005 to help launch on-demand operations. Louis had learned to switch from on-premise, packaged software to on-demand operations from her previous employer, Centra Software Inc. of Lexington. The on-demand business at Centra grew from 15 percent to 20 percent of the company’s revenue under Louis’ tenure as vice president of e-business operations, she said.

“You really have to change every aspect of the business when you move to on-demand operations, and I knew all the pitfalls along the way,” Louis said.

Today Louis takes her experience on the road pro bono, mentoring companies that plan to take their operations on-demand (also known as “software-as-a-service”).

“It is a challenge I love talking about. If someone can learn from us, that’s the goal,” she said.

Louis’ responsibilities at Authoria include managing Authoria’s customer support staff in Waltham and at its operations in Bangalore, India, where one-third of the company’s 350 employees are based.

Her career path began at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she studied comparative religions. The Southern California native then went to Boston University in pursuit of a law degree, but ultimately turned to business and scored a job as a management consultant for Baltimore-based Bell & Co. in 1980. She traveled the United States, consulting particularly to help turn around struggling tech operations.

Louis moved to Lowell-based Wang Laboratories in 1983 as a manager for operations, then to Cambridge-based Lotus Development in 1986. There, she started as production and inventory-control manager, and climbed to vice president of customer operations. She left after a decade of service when the company was acquired by IBM Corp.

“I enjoy working for smaller companies because you can have a bigger impact in those places. At big companies, you spend 80 percent of your time trying to convince people of your good ideas, while at small companies you spend 80 percent of your time implementing good ideas,” she said.

As for the road ahead, the mother of two children said she is committed to her current position.

“Right now, I am excited about my work at Authoria. I work with good, smart, team-oriented people, and at my age, that is important. It makes work a pleasure,” she said.

The medical field, the gaming industry and the pet accessories market have seemingly little in common, but Beth Marcus has built a name in all three.

As the founder of Bedford startup Zeemote Inc., her focus is now on the digital gaming industry. The company, which she founded in 2005 and is backed by $6.9 million she brought in last December, has developed a wireless handheld remote for mobile gaming and other applications. The device was launched at the recent Game Developers Conference in California and has become a favorite topic among the gaming bloggerati.

But it’s more than a toy. It incorporates several of Marcus’ 10 patents and has a long line of hard science behind it, including Marcus’ Ph.D. in biomechanics from the Imperial College of Science and Technology at the University of London.

Zeemote’s bloodline also includes Marcus’ former company, EXOS Inc., through which she developed the first force-feedback joystick for video games. She launched the company in 1988, and in 1996 sold it to Microsoft Inc. for an undisclosed amount.

After the sale of EXOS, Marcus took some time off from the technology industry, but not from entrepreneurship. In 1997, she founded Glow Dog Inc. which made reflective pet clothing. Later, she founded her own consulting firm, Marcus Enterprises Ltd., helping entrepreneurs get their ideas off the ground. Some, like Glow Dog (which closed in 2001) were less successful, while others, such as HBN Shoes Inc., which makes insoles aimed at taking the pain out of wearing high-heel shoes, continue to grow.

Prior to focusing on gaming, she applied her biomechanics knowledge to medical areas, as an assistant professor of orthopedics and physiology at New York University Medical School, and later as the manager of Arthur D. Little Inc.’s Medical Products Practice.

“Medicine and helping medical professionals is great and can help a lot of people, but it’s fairly limited in scope,” she said. “On the gaming side, we’re making a platform that could potentially be licensed to medical professionals down the road.” Plus, she added, the gaming industry is really fun.

Marcus also makes time to help the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. She’s been a member of the executive committee at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge. She was also a judge for Dean Kamen’s FIRST Robotics Competition, and after a brief hiatus, she will be retuning as a judge.

Marcus also speaks at a variety of forums, and admits that although she tries to help all the up-and-coming entrepreneurs she sees, the women get a little more attention.

“On a one-to-one basis in talking with people, I always spend a little more time with the women,” she said. “If everyone did that, they could really help. That extra few minutes just shows people that someone cares and encourages them to move forward.”

Christine Miska, systems engineering functional manager at BAE Systems Inc., decided to become an engineer over dinner as a teenager.

“In high school, I wanted to be an electrician, like my dad," she said.

Over dinner in her hometown of Agawam, her father changed her mind when he described how cold an electrician’s worksite can be in the winter when the heat isn’t yet turned on.

“He said, ‘Why don’t you look into engineering?’” Miska said.

It’s been smooth sailing ever since. Miska, 36, graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. After graduation, she went to work for General Electric Aerospace in Utica, N.Y., and while there, she received her master’s degree in electrical engineering from Syracuse University.

“I like problem solving,” she said.

Miska became a constant in an ever-changing corporate structure. Mergers and acquisitions repeatedly transformed her employer — from GE Aerospace to Martin Marietta Corp. to Lockheed Martin Aerospace Electronic Systems to, finally after five years, BAE Systems. She’s been working for BAE Systems in New England for the past 10 years — first in Nashua, N.H., and now in Lexington.

“Fifteen years seemed like forever when I started,” she said. “Time flies.”

Miska’s department at BAE Systems makes infrared goggles and scopes for night vision. Soldiers and firefighters can use the imaging systems to see at night and through smoke. The displays can show infrared-only or regular light with an infrared overlay, Miska said. The systems can also be mounted on tanks, used as handheld devices, or used to see tire tracks, tank tracks and footprints. “We say that we own the night,” Miska said.

Under Miska’s management, her group has more than doubled in the past year, going from 17 to 45 employees. “Business is good,” she said. “It was a real challenge to do that much interviewing.”

Miska said she doesn’t get to do much hands-on engineering work these days, but she also said she doesn’t miss it. “I get to live vicariously,” she said. “As long as I get to be close to design work, I can be OK with that. I don’t have to be writing the software and plugging in the connectors.”

Knowing her product helps soldiers and firefighters makes her job more rewarding, Miska said.

“We make things that are on the line today and in the soldiers’ hands in Iraq in a few weeks,” she said.

Even better, Miska brought an infrared scope home to show her 8-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son. Looking through the scope, they saw mostly darkness as they scanned, until they ran across a neighbor’s dog, whose heat registered as a bright white light.

“They think Mommy does cool stuff,” she said.

Take a look at multimedia designer Amanda Parkes’ title — co-founder, director of design engineering, Bodega Algae LLC — and you can’t help but wonder: What does multimedia design have to do with algae? But the fact is that Parkes, who has developed design exhibits, tools and educational programs in the United States and abroad, sees the design component in everything.

Parkes, a first-generation American raised by Irish parents in the surf town of Redondo Beach, Calif., says she didn’t even consider design until she got to college. “I wasn’t really a kid with a great dream,” she said. “I liked art and science, but it wasn’t until I got to Stanford (University) and saw the design major that I went that way.”

At Stanford she earned bachelor’s degrees in product-design engineering and art history, then weighed pursuing the curatorial path when she got the chance to intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Modern Art Collection in Venice, Italy. But, she says, “I missed the design end, and I was kind of tracing a path between technology and design.”

Parkes also spent time in London doing freelance work, but ultimately went home to California as a multimedia exhibit developer at The Exploratorium.

“That’s when I really found my niche,” she said. “It was very technical but also using design experience. And that’s what designers do — they create experiences for people.”

That niche drew her to the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, where she earned her master’s degree while working on design interactions, robotics and motion, and where she is close to finishing her Ph.D.

In 2006 and 2007 she organized the SIGGRAPH Unravel Fashion Show, which features “mobile technology and conceptual couture” — i.e., wearable electronics. “And not just things that light up, like that thing that Kanye West wore to the Grammys,” she says, but clothing made with fibers that can generate and store energy.

And the algae? Parkes joined Media Lab grad Sam Hill in Bodega, an MIT $100K finalist developing microalgae photobioreactors to grow algae biomass to be used for biofuels. Certain strains of microalgae contain high percentages of oil, making them more efficient to make biomass for biofuel than other crops. Bodega is about developing an efficient way to grow the algae by managing light distribution and making it a component of architectural design — alternative energy production as a visual adornment, if you will.

“Amanda is able to infuse her design experience into the technology that’s going into our product and combining it in a way that makes energy and energy industrialized equipment attractive to the everyday consumer, and makes it an architectural piece of a public use space or building,” says Hill, president for Bodega Algae.

“Here’s this beautiful glowing green liquid, and this is not how people think about oil,” Parkes says. “This could be your oil source but also your decorations, your wallpaper, your fountain.“

As an engineering student at Cornell University, Ellen Piccioli visited Digital Equipment Corp. to see microprocessors designed and fabricated. At the time, she was exploring general engineering studies, but the visit and job shadowing helped put her on a path that has led to her being one of this region’s most accomplished microprocessing engineering managers.

“I was just in awe of the whole process of design and development that enabled the creation of those chips,” she says.

After graduation, Piccioli went to work for DEC, where she began her career on the manufacturing side of the chip industry and later worked at Hewlett-Packard Co., where she helped implement design and speed debug activities for HP’s Alpha 21364 microprocessor.

As the industry consolidated, she found herself at Intel Corp., where today she is a senior engineering manager at Intel’s Massachusetts Microelectronic Design Center (MMDC). She led the pre-silicon validation team on IPF and Xeon family chip projects and was also a cluster design and architecture manager for the first-ever design project conducted at the MMDC.

Piccioli particularly enjoys the camaraderie and teamwork in the cross-disciplinary work of developing new technologies and says she often calls on the lessons she learned playing field hockey and lacrosse in her professional work.

As she has risen through the ranks and moved from manufacturing to design, she has never felt limited in her career: “I’ve been impressed by every company I’ve worked at in how they welcome women,” said Piccioli, 43.

Still, she knows that women aren’t entering the field in the numbers they could be. At her alma mater, for instance, about 20 percent of incoming engineering students in 1980 were women. In 2007, that figure was just 28 percent.

“It has improved, but boy, I bet we could do better,” she says.

Improving work-life balance is part of the answer. In chip design, Piccioli said time demands come with the territory — especially as deadlines loom — but believes flexibility within corporations and technology that lets people work from anyplace, anytime, are part of the solution.

In addition to staying involved with her alma mater in its efforts to encourage women to pursue engineering as a career, she also works with Intel in its efforts to generate interest in engineering among students in area schools.

Her own included a supportive guidance counselor who never discouraged her pursuit of engineering studies and an uncle who had a successful career in the field.

“Being a woman in the engineering field was never something I considered an obstacle,” she says. “There was an awareness, but I never thought of it as a hurdle.”