UCSB celebrates Hispanic and Latino scientists and engineers

 

POSTED ON Sep 23, 2022

 

While Ellen Ochoa, NASA’s first female Hispanic astronaut, is a household name, there are other less known but equally remarkable success stories of Hispanics and Latinos in science, technology, engineering, and math fields.

As part of its Hispanic Heritage Month celebrations, the College of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) has showcased the achievements of undergraduate and graduate students, inventors, astronauts, and computer science professors “who have made or are currently making remarkable contributions to engineering and related STEM disciplines while inspiring members of the COE and greater Hispanic and Latinx communities.”

First in his family to go to college, Steven Gomez is now a materials Ph.D. student. He also serves as a graduate advisor for the UCSB student chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), known as Los Ingenieros.

Jorge Gutierrez, another first-generation college student, is a fourth-year electrical engineering major at UCSB. He serves as co-chair of Los Ingenieros (LI) and hopes to start a company that focuses on providing renewable solar panels to impoverished communities.

At the age of 23, Guillermo González Camarena was awarded a patent for the first color television transmission system. González Camarena built by hand all of the equipment used for Mexico’s and Latin America’s first television station. He also championed the use of TVs for transmitting educational shows to remote, school-less locations in Mexico. González Camarena’s work provided a foundation for the modern color televisions that followed, and NASA used his mechanism aboard Discovery I in 1979 to transmit images from Jupiter.

José Hernández earned a master’s degree from UCSB in 1986. He went on to work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he co-developed the first full-field digital mammography imaging system for the early detection of breast cancer. Hernández entered NASA’s astronaut program in 2004, but only after he was accepted on his twelfth attempt. He spent fourteen days in space in 2009 as a flight engineer on board STS-128, a NASA Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. During the mission, he became the first person to send a tweet in Spanish from space. Hernández now runs his own aerospace company, working with companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and he runs a non-profit to inspire youth to follow their dreams. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed Hernández to the University of California Board of Regents. Amazon Studios is producing a biofilm, A Million Miles Away, based on Hernández’s inspirational story, starring Michael Pena as the UCSB graduate.

Scarlin Hernandez is now a spacecraft engineer for NASA’s signature space mission, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). She wrote and tested codes for different systems that are used to command the JWST in space, maintaining its position and orientation. In July, NASA released the first full-color images from the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope, demonstrating the JWST’s power and ability to unfold the hidden universe.

Ellen Ochoa was NASA’s first female Hispanic astronaut. She completed four missions and spent more than nine hundred hours in space. She was later promoted to director of the Johnson Space Center, becoming the first Hispanic director and only the second female director of the center. After retiring from the Johnson Space Center in 2018, she became vice chair of the National Science Board (NSB), which runs the National Science Foundation. She became NSB chair in 2020.

Daniel Oropeza has mentored students from underrepresented minorities throughout his academic and professional career, serving as a graduate diversity ambassador and undergraduate research mentor at MIT, and volunteering for Big Brother Big Sisters and Project Lead the Way. He hopes to continue supporting and guiding students of all backgrounds toward STEM fields and advancing the field of materials and manufacturing of aerospace structures throughout his career.

Daniela Rivera Mirabal is a second-year chemical engineering Ph.D. student. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez (UPRM). Rivera Mirabal has been passionate about environmental sustainability since she was a child, and she decided to become an engineer in order to develop novel materials for environmental applications. She believes that STEM research is a powerful vehicle for change and that different perspectives and life experiences are essential because they provide innovative solutions to existing problems. Click here to read more.