Features Hispanic Leaders

Watching the Apollo 11 moon landing in the summer of ‘69 on a black and white television in Venezuela, 6-year-old Alberto Martinez Magliano was thunderstruck with a love for science. It was that wondrous event, he says, that spawned a generation of would-be engineers like him. From that point in time, Martinez became a “studious […]

Growing up in a low-income neighborhood in East Los Angeles, Jose Luis Jacobo Jr. remembers struggling with English in school (Spanish being his first language). Surprisingly, his next fluency would come in mathematics, numbers being a “universal language”—and one he easily understood. Nurtured by a supportive family and network of mentors, his abilities in science, […]

Picture a room full of engineers and U.S. government stakeholders—the vanguard of the country’s nuclear deterrent program—discussing how to best evaluate and upgrade critical equipment. Within a few moments, they enter a mixed reality environment where they can see system requirements and digital models up close—all on a single collaborative digital screen. Or a field […]

Juan Salgado was eight years old when he moved with his mother from a village in the hills of El Salvador—a place with no running water and minimal electricity—to the town of Coatepeque, about 15 miles from the city of Santa Ana. For Salgado, the change was bittersweet. He missed the pristine beauty of the […]

As he gazed out at the thousands of youthful faces staring back intently from the audience, Robert Anchondo couldn’t help but marvel at the gravity of it all. Thirty years ago, it might’ve been him out there, listening to an accomplished Hispanic engineer talk about their journey, about hurdles scaled and odds overcome. That’s when […]

He completed an internship with NASA the summer after his junior year of college. Within a month of graduating—the first in his family to do so—he landed as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. Three years later, at the age of 24, he was overseeing all exterior, interior and chassis warranty claims at the company’s […]

It’s the kind of question Ellen Ochoa has heard more times than she can count, from fans, press and peers alike: When you first flew into space, saw the earth looming like a huge swirling marble below, more removed from life than you’d ever been before, what did you think about? Those expecting some stirring […]

Not long into her tenure as president and CEO of CommuniCard, Sylvia Acevedo received a phone call from a researcher at Stanford University, where she had received her master’s in engineering two decades earlier. As one of the first Latina students to earn a graduate engineering degree from the prestigious school, Acevedo was asked how, […]

At the GM Lansing Delta plant in Delta Township, Michigan, more than 3,000 employees are working together to build thousands of Buick Enclaves and Chevrolet Traverses, move them off the line and to dealer lots throughout the country. These are massive undertakings, entailing millions in research and development—requiring a microscopic eye for detail from all […]

Ilenia Herrera remembers getting a call from one of her many hires, a young Hispanic American man who had just earned a big promotion and wanted to thank Herrera for giving him his first post-college job. She remembers the young woman whose entire family cleaned houses on weekends, just to earn enough to send her […]