10 Amazing Latina Women In STEM

The Latinx community is one that has been attracting attention in recent years as more Americans become aware of the rich influence it has had on our country. Despite this increased attention,, Latinas in STEM fields, in particular, remain underrepresented and underappreciated. Fortunately, this hasn’t stopped so many amazing women from breaking the glass ceiling and paving the way for all the passionate young Latinas following them. From leading and teaching to research and invention here are just a few of the many trailblazers showing the world what it means to be a Latina in STEM.

Jazlyn L. Carvajal

STEM Path: Science

Jazyn L. Carvajal is the daughter of a Chilean father and a Puerto Rican mother. She has founded multiple businesses and organizations throughout her life,including an event planning company and the business consulting firm Stay On Your Daily. Most notably, she is the co-founder of Latinas In Stem, an organization devoted to inspiring young Latina K-12 students to enter the S.T.E.M. field. Through her organization, Carvajal shares the obstacles she has faced in the hopes of providing other Latinas a blueprint for succeeding in a field where they are often underrepresented and underappreciated. Carvajal founded Latina’s in Stem with her fellow MIT alumnae – all of whom are first generation Americans and first generation college students.

Sabrina Gonzalez Paterski

STEM Path: Science

At just 24 years old, this physicist has a résumé unmatchable byeven veterans of her field.. Gonzalez Pasterski, a doctoral student studying high energy physics in the Ivy League,, started showing signs as a 10 year old taking flying lessons that she’d someday break barriers.. Three years later, she started to build her first kit aircraft; by the time she was 15,her aircraft was considered airworthy.

These days, Gonzalez Pasterski, who studies black holes and spacetime, specifically trying to explain gravity within the context of quantum mechanics, has been cited by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Andrew Strominger.  Furthermore she’s been offered jobs by NASA and Blue Origin, which is an aerospace research and development company started by Amazon.com founder, Jeff Bezos. Notably, she’s also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to support her work.

Gabriela Farfan

STEM Path: Science

Gabriela Farfan is a mineralogist who has studied rocks since she was just a child in Wisconsin. Currently, the Chilena is a four-year graduate student at MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in Oceanography, where she studies chemical oceanography. When she was a freshman geology major, she won an Intel Science Talent Search award for her independent research explaining why some gemstones appear to change color when viewed from different angles. Her findings landed her an invitation from former first lady, Michelle Obama, to attend the 2010 State of the Union Address. A spokesperson from the White House referred to her as one of the, “outstanding young leaders in the scientific community.” 

This year, the Mineralogical Society of America awarded her the Edward Kraus Crystallographic Research Grant, bringing the modern, multidisciplinary mineralogist one step closer to her dream of being a working scientist and a mineral curator at a natural history museum.

Cecilia Aragon

STEM Path: Technology

Cecilia Aragon is a computer scientist, an inventor, a pilot, and a professor at the University of Washington (UW). As a child, English teachers would often accuse her of plagiarism under the assumption that a Hispanic daughter of immigrants couldn’t possess Aragon’s writing skills. Because of this, she gravitated towards mathematics, where her academic talents were less scrutinized. However, changing gears did not put an end toAragon’s experience with discrimination in the classroom. As she pursued her PHD at the University of California, Berkeley, students and teachers alike questioned how a Hispanic woman could succeed in the field of computer science. Feeling the pressures of marginalization, she found comfort in flying planes and eventually became the first Latina in the United States Aerobatic Team. 

Aragon’s work in computer science includes co-inventing the treap, a binary search tree data structure. Today she directs the Human-Centered Data Science Lab at UW and continues to share her story in the hopes of inspiring young Latinas to follow their dreams.

Lucía Gallardo

STEM Path: Technology

Lucía Gallardo is a Honduras native and the founder and CEO of Emerge, a company using emerging technology to help solve global issues. Through her company, Gallardo provides technological resources to groups working for social change, or as the company calls it, “impact as a service”. Because of her impact, Gallardo was  named one of MIT’s Latin American Innovators Under 35 in 2019. Her company itself has been nominated for multiple awards, including the Global SDG Award in 2018 and Newsweek’s Blockchain Impact Award in 2019.

Gallardo continued to pursue her vision of change through technology, even amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020 she founded Tabik, a Latin-American entrepreneurial community that distributes free educational resources. In addition to being a successful role model for women and marginalized communities, Gallardo has made sure every step she takes is a step toward change and progress.

Laura I. Gomez

STEM Path: Technology

Laura Gomez is one of the leading ladies in tech. At 17, when the formerly undocumented Mexican immigrant first obtained a work permit, she took an internship with Hewlett-Packard. Seeing no one like her in the workplace, she instantly wanted out. However, she decided to stay in the field after her mother, who saw a lucrative career for Gomez in tech, encouraged her to stay.

 Gomez would go on to work as one of the only Latinas at Google and YouTube. She then became a founding member of Twitter’s international team, where she led Twitter en Español. After experiencing  underrepresention and discrimination in the tech world, Gomez decided to do something about it, founding (and acting as CEO) of Atipica in 2015. Atipica is a recruiting software start-up that uses artificial and human intelligence to help companies make bias-free decisions when hiring employees.

Stephanie Castillo

STEM Path: Technology

Stephanie Castillo is the woman behind Latina Girls Code (LGC), a Chicago-based program that provides education and resources to young Latinas between the ages of 7 and 17 who are interested in technology. LGC aims to fill the diversity gap in S.T.E.M. through workshops, hackathons, and weeks-long programs on technology languages and entrepreneurial skills.

Many of the program’s participants are facing unique experiences in unique circumstances.  To attend to these, as well, the initiative is now more than just a technological transformation for the Hispanic communities. When Castillo is not teaching the girls how to code or gifting them with laptops, she’s an immigration adviser, helping these same young Latinas, many of them undocumented, to navigate further education and employment opportunities.

Eileen Vélez-Vega

STEM Path: Engineering

Eileen Vélez-Vega was raised in Puerto Rico where she balanced her love for her home with a desire to see the world.  As a girl, she attended NASA’s space camp and was well-known in school for her math and science skills. She credits her interest in aviation to growing up on an island; it helped her recognize the importance of aviation and its role in connecting the world. Vélez-Vega went on to complete a two-year internship with NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center and later to work for the U.S. Army while obtaining her Master’s degree in engineering. Since 2006, she has worked as an Aviation project manager at Kimley-Horn first in Florida and then in Puerto Rico. Today she is managing projects in all of Puerto Rico’s ten airports. 

Diana Sierra

STEM Path: Engineering

Diana is the co-founder of Be Girl, a social enterprise designing affordable, high-quality, and reusable menstrual materials for destitute females around the world. The Colombian industrial designer started Be Girl in 2012 after learning how many young women around the world drop out of school, because they don’t have items to manage their periods. Unfortunately, these women then found themselves without formal education, which led to economic disadvantages and low self-esteem. Through her design, Sierra hopes to help destigmatize menstruation, keep girls in school, and prevent non-biodegradable waste to which disposable pads contribute.

Ellen Ochoa

STEM Path: Engineering

Ellen Ochoa is a Mexican-American engineer, former astronaut, and the current director of the Johnson Space Center. Ochoa became director of the center upon the retirement of the previous director, Michael Coats, on December 31, 2012. She is the first Latina to assume this position in the history of the organization. In 1993, Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman in the world to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the shuttle Discovery.

Sources:

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