The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) announced recently that President Emerita Diana Natalicio was posthumously awarded the Great Minds in STEM Chairman’s Award in Pasadena, California on Oct. 8. Ann Gates, senior vice provost for faculty affairs, accepted the award on behalf of UTEP and Natalicio’s family.
Great Minds in STEM, formerly known as the Hispanic Engineering National Achievement Awards Conference (HENAAC), is an organization based in California that honors Hispanic engineers and scientists at the top of their fields.
The Chairman’s Award was created in 1989 to honor Jaime Escalante, the math and calculus teacher at Garfield High School in Los Angeles whose story was portrayed by Edward James Olmos in the film “Stand and Deliver.”
Natalicio was the president of UTEP from 1988 to 2019. She was the first female president in UTEP’s history and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2016. She died in September 2021.
“As is often said about Dr. Natalicio, she was a pioneer in higher education, a community builder, a community leader, and, most importantly, a steward of thousands of young lives who graduated from UTEP because she believed that everyone deserves a chance to get a quality education,” Gates said upon accepting the award.
Great Minds in STEM Chairman Juan Rivera, Ph.D., a UTEP graduate, presented this year’s award. To honor her legacy, UTEP launched the Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success in 2022 to advance research into best practices in Hispanic-serving institutions and serve as a national platform for thought leaders and policymakers.
“The ‘access and excellence’ that [Natalicio] passionately believed in transformed UTEP from a regional university into a highly competitive national research university that never lost sight of its responsibility to create social mobility pathways for the region’s residents,” Rivera said. “Her passion to transform lives and communities through education lives on through all of us who desire social equity and justice.”
A UTEP faculty member and an alumna also received Great Minds in STEM awards. Adeeba Raheem, Ph.D., assistant professor in the UTEP Department of Civil Engineering, received the Education Award. She was also one of 14 educators to receive the 2022 Outstanding Teaching Award conferred by The University of Texas System Board of Regents.
Margarita Ordaz, who graduated from UTEP in 2019 with a B.S. in Civil Engineering and now works with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, received the STEM Military Hero Award.
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