“I can’t allow prejudices to hold me back”

When Dana Drachsler Cohen talks about information technology, her enthusiasm shines through. “My work is my main hobby. And I even get paid for it!” says the 30-year old Israeli, her face lighting up. She joined the university in August 2017, receiving a grant under the ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. This programme provides two years of financial support to young researchers with high potential. Based in the Secure, Reliable, Intelligent Systems Lab of the Department of Computer Science, she is currently working on improving the reliability of modern computer systems.

She cites driverless vehicles as an example. “We must be able to rely on the fact that the car will stop if a pedestrian is on a zebra crossing or a child runs across the road”. These vehicles are equipped with a vast array of cameras and sensors. Using the data they provide, the system decides what action to take: swerve to avoid an object, brake, or stop altogether. The system is built around the deep learning method, which is a subdiscipline of artificial intelligence and is based on a type of neuronal network similar to those found in the human brain. Before travelling on public roads, the system learns how to make connections between the vehicle’s surroundings and the associated driving tasks.

The Israeli researcher is also working on the blockchain technology currently used for digital payment systems such as Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. The blockchain is a type of decentralised database that no one owns. This allows different users to process transactions. The blockchain can have a variety of uses, such as concluding contracts in the banking system or running elections. Computer networks are another area of Drachsler Cohen’s research. “All these things have a big impact on how we live,” she comments.

Worrying prejudices against women

As a woman, she is clearly in the minority in her department. Only around 15 percent of the academic staff is female. The eye-catching researcher with long brown hair certainly stands out in the corridors of the university’s CAB building. But she’s used to it. Even so, it would be good to see more women finding the confidence to work in IT. She is certain: “The basics of how to program should be taught as a compulsory subject at school, like Maths and English. That would make people less anxious in dealing with them.” Sometimes she gets annoyed by the preconception that men understand technology better than women. Even so: “I can’t allow that to hold me back – I want to carry on doing what I love most,” she says.

She tries to instil this confidence in her students. This semester she is holding a seminar on cryptocurrencies at ETH. “Anyone can read up on facts in books or on the Internet – I’d also like to teach people how to approach problems in the right way”. After all, there are always challenges to overcome: the next exam, the doctoral thesis, the next project. She has found that women especially can sometimes be plagued by self-doubt. She had similar experiences during her studies. What happens is she fails? But she gradually learned to deal with the problems one by one and eventually discovered: “Success can be addictive. Seeing your hard work pay off and continuously improving is a great source of satisfaction. Then you immediately want to repeat the experience.”

Her ambition is to become a professor. She likes switching between research and teaching. One benefits the other: not only does research inject fresh life into lectures, but vice versa. On top of that, she wants to play her part in educating the next generation.

First website programmed at the age of eleven

Even as a young child, Drachsler Cohen was fascinated by computers. Her father is a programmer and her mother a microbiologist. It was clear from an early age that she would follow an academic career. She programmed her own first website at the tender age of eleven. “The instructions were in English and my knowledge of the language was not so good at the time,” she says with a grin. So she simply studied the code and played around with it a bit until she understood it. She attended her first IT course when 14 years old. After leaving school she went on to study at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology in her home city of Haifa, before eventually receiving her doctorate in 2017.

Since moving to Switzerland she has led a long-distance relationship with her husband, also a computer scientist. He comes to visit every two weeks, and they go walking in the countryside whenever they can. She loves Switzerland’s mountains, lakes and waterfalls. She is particularly taken by Zermatt: “The Five Lakes Walk is amazing”. Only when she has a work deadline looming does she allow herself no free time. “Then everything else is unimportant – sometimes I even forget to eat!”