Every year, Deutsche Messe presents the Engineer Powerwoman Award to an expert who has made an outstanding contribution to the scientific and technical disciplines. This year's winner, Dr. Christina Franke, is a woman who is advancing her career in an industrial company. She has been working as Head of Development in the Assembly Technology business unit at Bosch Rexroth in Stuttgart since June 2022.
After studying design and production engineering at Saarland University and spending a year abroad in Sweden, Dr. Franke worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Production Engineering from 1999. In December 2003, she completed her dissertation in the field of 'Process Chain Planning in the Digital Factory' at Saarland University. In June 2004, she started her professional career in the Bosch Group as a trainee and quickly took on management tasks in production and quality management. From 2011 to 2015, she helped set up production at the Powertrain plant in Wuxi, China. This was followed by an assignment as a consultant to the Bosch Board of Management. In 2017, she took over as Head of Technical Project Purchasing Commercial and Offroad Vehicles for Powertrain Solutions in the Bosch Group's Central Purchasing department. From mid-2019, she was responsible for engineering in the Corporate Research and Advance Engineering division, where she led innovation work in the areas of Industry 4.0 and electromobility, among others.

The prize was presented by the chair of the jury, Prof. Barbara Schwarze, Competence Center Technology Diversity Equal Opportunities, Bielefeld.

The WomenPower career congress is a networking and discussion event for women. It is held every year as part of the Hannover Messe and is primarily aimed at participants from the STEM sector. In addition to the programme of lectures, panel discussions and workshops, WomenPower offers companies, associations, networks, organizations and trainers the opportunity to find out about career prospects, studies, coaching and mentoring offers as well as other labour policy topics and trends in the accompanying exhibition. This year, the WomenPower career congress is celebrating its twentieth anniversary.