News & Opportunities

2022 AWAF Award Winners Announced

The AWAF Awards are designed to celebrate and honor the achievements of women and change champions who live the AWAF mission of advancing and empowering women in the automotive industry. 

Ashwini Balasubramanian will receive the Industry Achievement Award. This award honors a woman who has made an outstanding contribution for at least (10) years in the automotive industry while also making a difference by promoting and supporting her fellow women to achieve their automotive career aspirations.

Ashwini currently is a Group Chief Engineer for Harley-Davidson Motor Company and has been in the automotive industry for nearly 20 years. She is a highly driven and collaborative executive experienced in leading large global teams and has a US Patent “Headliners and Vehicles with Improved Speech Transmission Characteristics."

Ashwini has a strong commitment to helping other women succeed. Inspired by her own experiences, Ashwini founded the Michigan Women’s Resource Group (WRG) at ZF in 2013, which grew to 515 women in 6 years and had four strong chapters in the state of Michigan. She led the creation of focus groups for new moms, caregivers, and personal finance management. She also launched the first formal mentoring network at ZF with the pilot program starting in Michigan with 50 women gaining access to mentors. She helped create a playbook for starting other similar ERGs.  

 At her next employer, Martinrea International, she played a crucial role in establishing a flexible work policy through critical discussions and justifying the benefits to the CEO.  

At Harley-Davidson, she is the executive sponsor of two Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) and Asia Pacific Islander group, and another called CREW (Creating Relationships Empowering Women), where she is working to establish a pilot mentoring program for the women.  She also leads the DE&I efforts and has adopted a three-prong approach that includes recruitment, retention, and development. Along with HR, she has established a focused approach to drive recruitment efforts to improve diversity. She is establishing guidelines for leadership positions to understand how to manage diverse teams and keep unconscious biases in check. 

She also actively mentors women around the globe at various levels of their career. She takes a proactive active approach and believes in providing actionable insights. Her mentoring has helped several women navigate challenging situations which includes difficult critical conversations at work like pay negotiation, conflict resolution, return to work after FMLA and preparing for interviews.  

She is also passionate about building a strong pipeline for engineering by kindling their interest right from school age. To support this, Ashwini volunteers with Engineering Society of Detroit (ESD) for their Girls in Engineering program.  

Ashwini also volunteers with the Achieving Women Enterprise Foundation (AWE)-Detroit, which is focused on bringing tools, investments, training to the African American Women Entrepreneurs and with the Junior Achievement of Michigan and was recently a mentor for the Financial Literacy program for the Detroit area middle school students. 

Amanda Nummy will receive the Emerging Leader Award. This award honors a woman who has been in her career 10 years or less and has demonstrated outstanding performance, as well as leadership in her professional work and the community.

Amanda is a senior polymer materials engineer with almost a decade of experience in the automotive industry, making significant contributions in that time. In her current role at Hyundai-Kia, she is responsible for all plastic components for North and South America. She is considered the local expert in alternative energy and sustainable materials, leading global collaborations for fuel cells and battery electric vehicles. Most significantly, she developed a test method for material evaluation of battery enclosures under thermal runaway conditions, which was published as a UL standard that will be used by automakers and suppliers around the world to accelerate development of materials and designs enabling polymeric solutions. This work has been enthusiastically received by the industry, increasing design opportunities for safe, affordable, longer-range, and more sustainable vehicles.

Amanda presented this work at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) World Congress this year, marking six consecutive years of participation as an author and speaker. In previous years, she led development of recycled materials from non-traditional feedstocks for reuse in vehicle components, addressing critical environmental and public health concerns including recovery of ocean-bound plastic, and pioneering a new supply chain to collect and recycle single-use face masks. This further creates a secondary market value for plastic waste, fostering social and economic development in collection areas around the globe.

In non-technical areas, Amanda co-founded an employee resource group for women in her workplace and serves as a mentor within the vehicle engineering division. Through SAE, she volunteers as an industry lecturer, panelist, and committee member on topics including sustainability, future mobility, and career advancement, shaping a better future for people and the planet. In addition to her ongoing automotive work, she recently became a biomimicry consultant, focusing on holistic nature-inspired design solutions for moving the transportation industry beyond net-zero to a positive and regenerative environmental impact. This fall, she was accepted into the Biomimicry Professional Certification program, in which she will progress as part of a diverse, elite group of biomimicry leaders with the highest level of immersive training in this emerging field.

She earned a B.S. in Polymer, Textile, and Fiber Engineering from Georgia Tech, and M.S. in Materials Science from Wayne State. She is near completion of a postgraduate degree in Biomimicry from Arizona State University, where she is an Ecotone Scholarship recipient, serves as a Graduate Assistant, and was inducted into the Omicron Delta Kappa National Leadership Honor Society. She has been recognized with several other awards including the SAE International 2022 Environmental Excellence in Transportation, the 2020 Innovator of the Year, Empowering Women in Industry, the 2019 Employee of the Year, Hyundai-Kia Technical Center and in 2018 the Best Paper Award, Hyundai Motor Group Global Conference.

The SEMA Businesswomen's Network (SBN) for the All-Female Build will receive the Group Achievement Award. This is given to a group of women who working together to make an exceptional contribution to the automotive & mobility industry. This includes exemplary teamwork and leadership exhibited and the significance of the accomplishment. 

SBN debuted its All-Female Bronco Build at the 2022 SEMA Show in early November. This build features a ’21 Ford Bronco Wildtrak with modifications on all elements, including the suspension, wheels and tires, electrical, lighting, exhaust, intake and wrap. The build project kicked off in July with a large group of women representing all facets of the automotive industry. The build’s early phase included work at the SEMA Garage in Diamond Bar, California. The Bronco next made its way to the SEMA Garage in Detroit with another group of women finished the Bronco for the show. Having an all-female build highlighted the many successful and talented women in the automotive industry and helps to attract more females to pursue careers in the automotive industry. This campaign marked the 10-year anniversary of SBN’s first award-winning All-Female build of a Ford Mustang.

CADIA will receive the Change Champion Award. This award recognizes a man or company who has contributed significantly to the acceptance and advancement of women in the automotive industry.

The Center for Automotive Diversity, Inclusion and Advancement (CADIA) was launched in 2017 by Cheryl Thompson with the idea that diverse talent had long been overlooked and undervalued in the automotive industry. CADIA has evolved into a mission driven, member-oriented organization, providing diversity, equity & inclusion tools, networks, insights, and practical advice to companies in the auto-mobility space.  CADIA has worked with thousands of individuals and hundreds of companies to become more diverse, more inclusive, and more of a home for all people, but especially those who have been traditionally underrepresented, many of them women.  They accomplish their mission through programs like DEI roundtables and workshops, certification programs and corporate DEI assessment and roadmap Development, just to name a few.

The awards will be presented at the 2022 AWAF Holiday Affair on December 1st.