maxon - Virginie Mialane

2021 Women in Engineering

Virginie Mialane

Medical Market Manager maxon France

Masters of Physics from Marseille University

Talk about the culture at your company. What makes it inclusive or supportive of women in engineering and automation?

As a female engineer, I realized that technical expertise is well recognized in the scientifi c world. Rigor and tenacity are also qualities that are sought after in female engineers. What I like about maxon is the collaboration on innovative projects with added value. We can work with the medical engineers in Switzerland, in Germany or in France to develop the solutions our customers need. Intellectually, this collaboration is very enriching and dynamic.

Engineering diploma in Materials and Interfaces from Lyon Engineering School

Describe a recent company project (in which you were involved) that went particularly well. How did you and your team go about ensuring success?

The maxon world meeting was held in France this year. It involved a visit of the factory with several speakers discussing our skills and our capabilities. We worked in small teams to focus on a theme (R&D, manufacturing, supply chain, etc.) then highlighted our competencies with applications that the speakers worked on. This collaboration was very demanding time wise, but very successful and appreciated by our visitors.

Virginie Mialane earned a Master of

Physics from Marseille University and furthered her education with an Engineering diploma in Materials and Interfaces from Lyon Engineering School. Her career began in November of 1999 when she joined an industrial SME specializing in biocompatible coatings for orthopedic implants. She joined maxon France in 2003 as a Project Manager developing one of the fi rst motorized implants in the maxon group. After more than a decade in the R&D department supporting several projects for medical applications, she was promoted to the French Medical Market manager role in January 2018.

Describe your biggest career challenge. How did you solve it — or what was the outcome or lesson learned?

Several years ago, I worked on a custom project with a Chinese team. As I said before, the international part of my job is really something I appreciate a lot and I like developing. For the fi rst time, I worked in collaboration with the Asian team. I struggled to fi nd the best way to work with the team to go further and quicker in the project despite taking several trips and work sessions locally. It took me several weeks to fi gure out how to move forward, I needed to abandon my traditional project management ways and listen to and give more advice to the local team working on it, even if it didn’t seem to be going in the right direction at fi rst. In doing so, the results were more apparent. Sometimes we need to forget our own plan to be more openminded to be more successful.