Emilija Stojmenova Duh, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Faculty of electrical engineering, University of Ljubljana. She has founded and is coordinating the national FabLab network in Slovenia. She is Director of Digital Innovation Hub Slovenia, whose main aim is to support the Slovenian industry, education and municipalities to fully benefit from digital innovations to upgrade its products and services, improve its processes and adapt its business models to the digital change. She is coordinating several projects on digitalization for innovation and rural development. Her work focuses mainly on the fields of open innovation, co-creation, user centered design and digitalization for development.
During 2014 and 2016, she was head of Demola Slovenia, part of Demola Network, which is recognized as best practice example for innovation policy makers by OECD and World Bank. She was the first chair of the IEEE “Women in engineering Slovenia”. One of her most important missions is to encourage young girls to study engineering, and later empower women to stay in the field and dare to take leadership positions in science and engineering. As such, in 2018 she was one of the 50 women from all over the world to take part in ‘Hidden No More’, one of the US State Department’s international visitor leadership exchange programmes, aimed at evening out the gender gap in STEAM. She was one of the ten nominees of the first “Female engineer of the year” competition in Slovenia.