Gulay won the 2020 Woman Leader Making a Difference with New Technologies award at Microsoft’s Women Leaders of Technology Awards. The award recognized her leadership at GEDS over the past 13 years, as well as at the MATUROLIFE project where she is the design lead and manages the design of smart products for older people to make their lives more comfortable and independent.
According to global studies by Microsoft, 600,000 more women in technology markets would create $18 billion in the economy. In order to utilize this potential, Microsoft has hosted the awards in order to promote and name women role models in technology since 2016.
“I am deeply pleased and honored to receive this award and would like to thank Microsoft, the jury, my team, our partners, clients, families, and friends for their support. Special thanks go to our MATUROLIFE project partners and European Commission Horizon2020 team. Hopefully, I can encourage women to create technology solutions for global grand challenges. Since day one at GEDS, we have been eager to go bold and tackle the big challenges in digitalization. We are here to make digitalization more human-centric and ecological,” Gulay said.
MATUROLIFE is a nanotechnology textile project funded by European Commission’s H2020 research program with a 6 million Euro budget that aims to create prototypes for assistive technology products enhanced with smart textiles that uses design as a strategic tool to make older people’s life more independent and comfortable. The prıoject is commissioned to 20 organizations including GEDS from 9 EU countries by the European Commission and led by Coventry University. In this unique project, as the design lead, GEDS leads the aim of putting the human element into the technology development process via several tools and domains of design together with its project partners
This is GEDS’ fourth recognition in the past 12 months after the Lions Club’s Woman Entrepreneur Making a Difference award in June 2019, second place at the DMI Design Value Awards in September 2019, and the Fast Company Female Founders 100 in April 2020.
Congrats for this great and very deserved award, Gulay, I just was aware of it! Hope to enjoy working together again soon!!