The Modern-Day Technology Leader (MDTL) award presented at the annual BEYA STEM Conference, as well as the Tech All-Star and Rising Star awards—part of the Outstanding Achievement Award category—at the Women of Color STEM Conference are some of the most prestigious awards presented by Career Communications Group, publisher of Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine, Women of Color magazine, and USBE magazine. In each of these award categories, nominees cover the spectrum in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Some nominees are just starting their careers and helping to shape technology for the future, while others are at mid-level to advanced stages and have demonstrated excellence in the workplace and their communities.
The MDTL and the Tech All-Star and Rising Star awards are based on employer recommendations. The nomination packages go through a rigorous review by a panel of leaders from industry, government, and academia.
Meet some of the extraordinary women in STEM who have received these awards recently. Their nominating employers are world leaders in unmanned air, surface, and land products, services, and support for aerospace and defense customers; public utilities that provide natural gas and electricity to millions of people; management and information technology consulting firms; mutual insurance companies; advertising and analytics divisions that operate online platforms for buying and selling consumer-centric digital advertising; multinational corporations that design, manufacture, market, and distribute vehicles and vehicle parts and sell financial services; not-for-profit university-affiliated research centers; defense, aviation, information technology (IT), and biomedical research companies that provide scientific, engineering, systems integration, and technical services; facilities that provide simulation capability to serve aerothermal and thermal response simulation requirements for NASA’s mission directorates; and business segments that produce air and missile defense systems, precision weapons, radars, and command and control systems
During her four years at Booz Allen Hamilton, Dianna J. Abreu has supported the deployment of two applications across the Veterans Health Administration, allowing veterans and their caregivers to meet with health care providers through any computer, tablet, or mobile device with an Internet connection. In 2019, Abreu was asked by leadership to help stand up the project management office for the VA Information Technology Operations and Services (ITOPS) contract. In doing so, she helped create a strategy and produced a dashboard on Tableau to visualize and analyze risk for executive leadership.
Abreu’s dedication to health care and the patient experience began while she was a student working with nurses at the Georgetown Clinical Simulation Center using technology like Microsoft HoloLens and Google Glasses. Also, Abreu completed an internship with GlobeMed, which aims to mobilize a community of students and grassroots leaders to work together to improve people’s health around the world. Abreu spent a summer in Guatemala working in a clinic and worked during her junior year to acquire more funding and revamp its health education programs. Currently, she serves as vice president of the Booz Allen Women and Data Science Sponsorship committee. This team creates programming to support the advancement and promotion of female data scientists. Abreu holds a Bachelor of Science in healthcare management and policy, and a minor in public health.
Montserrat (Monty) Diaz is a Distribution Integrity Management Program (DIMP) data analyst at Consumers Energy. Since 2018, her efforts have produced high-quality results and contributed significantly to protecting, monitoring, and maintaining the natural gas distribution system. Diaz leads the department’s endeavor in implementing a tracking and traceability program using GPS and barcoding technology to document natural gas infrastructure and various pipe attributes as they are installed. This effort increases the opportunity to locate pipe assets underground more accurately and improve the ability to eliminate the risk if a common threat is identified and needs mitigation. Diaz has also created the company’s first near-real-time tracking of the DIMP’s potential threats. The process was previously highly manual, and through Diaz’ use of Tableau, the company can proactively monitor natural gas system risks. Diaz has an enthusiasm for contributing to Consumers Energy’s sustainability. She takes pride in pursuing her professional growth and is an active participant of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE).
Carolina Garcia is an experienced information system (IS) professional. Currently, she works as a senior change and release specialist supporting FM Global teams in the processes used for deployment of application and infrastructure changes. As a release manager, she has successfully coordinated many large-scale releases. She has also assisted in implementation and critical administrative functions for the application inventory and the change/vendor management systems that FM Global relies on. Since Garcia started at the service desk with the mutual insurance company based in Johnston, RI, she has volunteered for the United Way. As part of the United Way committee, she helped coordinate the 2015 United Way campaign for FM Global and is currently preparing for the 2021 campaign.
Imelda Trevino-Ingman is an engineering group manager at General Motors (GM). She has held this position since 2015. Since she started her GM career, Trevino-Ingman has worked in product development, global strategies and planning, and global manufacturing engineering. Her first assignment was as a production supervisor. Other positions she has held include the superintendent of tool and die/production, assembly business unit manager, and plant planner. Currently, Trevino-Ingman supports a Detroit college preparatory program. She has mentored youths in this program for the past three years. Prior, she was a mentor with Winning Futures. Both programs are partnerships with GM. Last June, Trevino-Ingman was asked to help establish a youth group at Redford High School through the Creative Worship Center Organization. She has been supporting this activity as the youth minister for just over a year. Trevino-Ingman also enjoys short-term mission work. She travels every other year to support youth activities in Guatemala. Trevino-Ingman holds a master’s degree in manufacturing management and another master’s in operations management from Kettering University. She attended the University of Texas A&M, Kingsville, TX, with two scholarships. In 1986, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, then moved to Michigan in 1987 to start her career with GM.
Martha Cervantes is an early-career mechanical engineer and leader who helps transform opportunities for trailblazing students at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, MD. She has made a bold impact in supporting novel diversity and inclusion strategies for the lab in the Cohort-based Integrated Research Community for Undergraduate Innovation and Trailblazing (CIRCUIT). The initiative, led by Johns Hopkins APL, establishes a nationally recognized, cohort-based leadership, research, and mentoring program for trailblazing students.
Cervantes is a trailblazer herself who participated in the first CIRCUIT program in 2017. During this time, she distinguished herself as a leader and scientist. She was one of the first students to transition from CIRCUIT to an APL internship and then to a full-time position at the laboratory, based on her consistent technical excellence and growth.
Cervantes currently divides her time between cutting-edge research tasks in her chosen mechanical engineering and STEM outreach field and research activities to mentor CIRCUIT students and develop the program directly. She is the project lead for this initiative and is integral to operational success and planning future directions. With her essential leadership, the program has expanded to support students from four area universities, over 50 students annually, and a diverse set of projects ranging from the deep sea to deep space, including significant artificial intelligence and robotics activities.
Bianca Sias is an enterprise transformation coach in the global technology infrastructure department at JPMorgan Chase & Co. She was recognized by JPMC’s Consumer & Community Banking line of business for the work she is doing to help drive the technology organization forward. As a transformation coach, she is responsible for being a disruptor for good and a connector to about 7,000 technologists. She is an active participant in business resource groups, especially Adelante, which promotes professional development and leadership opportunities for Hispanic and Latino employees, and the Black Organization for Leadership Development (BOLD). Sias constantly searches for ways of improvement. Make it Better is her life motto—inspired by her parents, who she says were patiently forgiving toward an abundantly curious child and young adult. She earned a bachelor’s degree in English with an emphasis in technical communication at Texas Tech University and is a member of the Society for Technical Communicators. When not working at JPMC, she is a PTA president; coaches her children in volleyball, softball, and basketball; tends to her tomato and herb garden; flexes her knowledge as a novice oenophile (wine lover); and enjoys running.
Rita Chavez has over 30 years of experience supporting the United States Air Force in its mission to monitor seismic activity in support of nuclear treaty verification. For the past 10 years, she has served as the Leidos program manager for a mission-critical program. She is currently managing a $46 million effort. She oversees a team of 35 people supporting a nuclear test monitoring contract for a real-time 24/7 system that acquires, processes, reports, and archives data from a worldwide array of sensors. Her duties involve contract management, funding analysis and planning, resource planning, recruiting and coordination, risk mitigation analysis, and personnel management. Chavez is responsible for resource planning, financial analysis, and contract execution of the operations and maintenance and research and development (R&D) efforts. In support of her community, Chavez volunteers in her local school, coaches Odyssey of the Mind and Lego Robotics teams, and helps raise money for academic scholarships in the Philippines.
Imelda Terrazas-Salinas is the test engineering group leader at the NASA Ames Research Center Thermophysics Facilities Branch. Every U.S. spacecraft that has entered an atmosphere has had arc jet testing performed at Ames Research Center. Terrazas-Salinas is responsible for the training and oversight of new test engineers and student interns. She has been mentoring interns since 2002; several of her interns have become full-time employees at NASA Ames. Three papers on which she was a co-author were awarded the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Best Paper by the AIAA Thermophysics Technical Committee. When she and her family moved to California, she did not speak English. Her teacher recognized her potential and suggested that she could be an astronomer. Later, in high school, her career guidance counselor and her Spanish teacher encouraged her to reach for the stars. After high school, she was accepted into Stanford University, where she soon declared engineering as her major. Terrazas-Salinas remembers, however, that many of her male relatives did not think that engineering was suitable for a woman. She also admits that her female relatives seemed to agree. Her parents, however, were supportive. She completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, earning both in just four years. Once again, a college advisor was instrumental to her success by giving her words of encouragement and guidance.
In 2019, Angelica Ceniceros joined the Excalibur Hit to Kill (HTK) program at Raytheon Missiles and Defense. Currently, she is the systems engineering lead for the HTK program. She creates Rhapsody models and Department of Defense—Air Force documentation capturing the program’s architecture and requirements. Her knowledge of model-based systems engineering tools and artifacts has allowed her to lead major sub-contractors and collaborate with other Raytheon divisions. Ceniceros has worked as a systems engineer at Raytheon Technologies since July 2017. She also provides mentoring at Raytheon, as well as in the local community in STEM , English, and Spanish. Ceniceros earned a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering with a minor in women and gender studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She went on to earn a master’s degree in the same field at the University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ. Some of the highlights of her career include serving as a researcher in the Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program, as a researcher with OSIRIS-Rex, a NASA asteroid study and sample return mission, as a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory intern, and as an MIT international science and technology initiatives Mexico intern. She assisted teachers and provided support for about 140 students as a foreign language conversation assistant in Spain.
Alejandra Ortiz is an electrical engineer at Textron Systems, part of a company serving customers in aerospace and defense, specialized vehicles, turf care, fuel systems, and more. Ortiz’ parents immigrated to the United States from Mexico over 40 years ago. “Pursuing a STEM degree, striving to make my parents proud, and serving as a role model to my younger siblings and extended family was not easy,” she writes. “Nevertheless, I was determined to become the first engineer in my family.” Ortiz always enjoyed problem solving, but no one in her family could guide her through college. “Additionally, throughout those five years, I was a barista at the campus coffee shop, a sorority sister for a national chapter, a basketball player for a Division III team, and an active member of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) chapter,” she said. Ortiz admits that while balancing these roles was not ideal when attempting to double major in electrical and biomedical engineering, each position taught her valuable lessons, such as making the perfect latte for a line of sleep-deprived classmates, living with 30 women from different backgrounds, and the importance of physical health. During her last year, she was diagnosed with a rare heart condition. Although her academics were not perfect, her four summers of internships helped prove she possessed the skills needed to be a successful engineer. Throughout her college engineering classes and even now, she is usually the only woman in the room in the engineering department at work. “By volunteering at STEM events with the Society of Women Engineers and being a STEM mentor for Spanish-speaking middle school girls, I hope to encourage them to pursue a STEM career path,” Ortiz says.
Hilda Vargas is a data analyst at Xandr. She is responsible for building advanced data analytics tools to help customer service teams handle the available data through the Xandr advertising platform. She is an excellent partner to the teams for which she builds tools. She listens to their issues, watches them work, and then designs data systems, infrastructure, analysis, and UI that make the day-to-day work of her stakeholders more data-driven. Vargas is known for being a key developer of data analytics UI known as Alfred. Alfred can build tools that solve data issues for teammates trying to use Xandr’s advertising platform on behalf of strategic customers. She also serves as the treasurer-finance lead for Vamos, Warner Media’s Hispanic business resource group. In 2019, Vargas led projects during Hispanic Heritage Month, helping raise funds to provide scholarships for high school students looking to continue their education in college and hosting career workshops to support employees. Last year, Vargas was able to ensure that work progressed in the virtual environment. She helped launch a channel for employees to learn and practice Spanish to ensure the organization had the resources to communicate with a diverse clientele and global employee community while maintaining a sense of connection and interaction. Vargas is a role model for the Latinx community at Xandr and ensures that STEM careers become more accessible for younger Latinx students.
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