Last year, Jelena Kovacevic became the new dean of New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering. She is the first woman to lead the institution in its 164-year history.

“I hope my appointment shows both girls and boys what they can do in a STEM field,” said Ms. Kovacevic, whose research involves fields as varied as traffic management and medicine, but who is also committed to gender parity at Tandon. “Our incoming class was 43 percent women, which is twice the national average,” she said. “My goal is to make it 51 percent.”

Ms. Kovacevic, 56, is from Belgrade, Serbia. Before the N.Y.U. gig, she was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon Un iversity in Pittsburgh for 15 years. For much of that time, she commuted from New York, spending weekends on the Upper West Side, where she lives with her husband, Giovanni Pacifici, 61, who works for IBM. Their daughter, Danica Pacifici, is about to graduate with a master of science in nursing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

DECAF AND PANCAKES I don’t set an alarm. During the week, I get up at 6, and on Sundays, I aim for 8, but my internal clock usually wakes me before that. I grew up drinking strong Turkish coffee, but I switched to decaf when I was pregnant and never went back.