Nifty Fifty Speaker Karen Panetta
kcollins | June 27, 2011Karen Panetta sometimes has to laugh at the way engineers are portrayed in drawings by young students at the schools she visits. The children's crayoned pictures usually depict boorish, geeky male stick figures wearing glasses; some of them have buck teeth and pimples, "and they're most always carrying wrenches," says Karen. Such are the musings of children, you might say, but Karen, an electrical and computer engineering professor at Tufts University in Medford, MA, is out to dispel such stereotypes at an early age in kids. "If you think being an engineer is sitting around being boring, you…