Latina Engineers Push To Defy Odds In Tech: Here’s Five Tech Leaders You Need To Know

The lack of diversity in the tech world continues to garner headlines and raise questions about the lack of gender representation in the tech workforce.

For Latina engineers, the path to success continues to be an uphill battle.

Here’s a list of Latina engineers that need to be celebrated

Scarlin Hernandez

Hernandez is an aerospace engineer working on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.  As a spacecraft engineer, an important part of her work is to test the ground systems that will command and control the telescope after it has been launched into space. The telescope is set to launch in 2021 and will be used to discover new planets and the first stars after the dark ages. 

The National Science Foundation awarded her a full college scholarship to the Capitol Technology University (CTU) in Laurel, MD.  Scarlin completed an internship at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and by the age of 20, she was part of the ground control system team for the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite.  

In 2013, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering, but she found her real niche in Astronautical Engineering.  

Zaida Hernandez-Irisson

She started at Gateway in the ESL program before earning a Barber/Cosmetology tech diploma and Electrical Engineering Technology associate degree with a Biomedical emphasis.

She served as District Ambassador to the Wisconsin Technical College System and is now earning a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering while working as an electrical engineer at FISCHER USA, Inc Zaida serves as the Employee Member for Racine County.

Samantha Dominguez 

Samantha Dominguez is a systems engineer at the Boeing Company in Oklahoma City. She has her dream job and now inspires the next generation. Dominguez originally planned to attend law school but switched gears after some professors encouraged her to pursue engineering. She focuses on defense radar systems for airplanes at Boeing.

Ellen Ochoa

Ochoa is an astronaut and engineer and was the first Hispanic woman in space on the space shuttle Discovery in 1993. She logged almost 1,000 hours in orbit and went on to serve as Director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

A specialist in the development of optical systems, she worked as a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and at the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She helped create several systems and methods that were awarded patents, including optical systems for the detection of imperfections in a repeating pattern and for the recognition of objects.