MODEL STUDENTS: Katherine Dunphy and Maria Mayorga aspire to be professors and hope to serve as role models to younger Latinas with an interest in studying engineering.

Engineering magazine features the work of two Latina Ph.D. candidates

When they were growing up, Katherine Dunphy and Maria Mayorga dreamed of being engineers, but something troubled both of them. They never saw Latinas like themselves in any engineering positions.

“I have never had a female engineering professor. With so few female engineering professors in general, how many of them do you think are Latina?” asks Dunphy.

According to 1997 U.S. Census figures only one percent of all college professors nationwide are Latinas.

Both women aim to boost that number by becoming professors. But their job as role models has started already.

In September, Dunphy, a Ph.D. student in ME, and Mayorga, a Ph.D. student in IEOR, will be featured in the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers’ magazine. The spread features the research of 10 Latina Ph.D. candidates from across the country chosen from a pool of 30 nominees.

Mayorga’s work deals with supply chain management, particularly inventory and capacity planning. She looks at ways to simultaneously make capacity investment decisions and operational decisions such as inventory planning. She aspires to teach operations management in an MBA program or undergrad business department.

Dunphy’s expertise is in nanoengineering. Her research combines engineering with the multi-disciplinary fields of electro-chemistry, biology, microfabrication and engineering fluids to develop research tools for biologists. She is working on a chip to be used in school biology labs to separate DNA by size and charge.

While IEOR has a relatively high percentage of female undergraduate and graduate students, Mayorga is the only Latina in her Ph.D. program. She has done well in the program, but admits that being the only one sometimes chips away at her confidence. During preliminary and qualification exams and when beginning her dissertation, she went through periods of self doubt.

“I think that underrepresented women tend to grapple more with self doubt than people who have a sense of belonging,” concurs Dunphy, “If you are a minority you look around you, and see that everyone is different from you. This tends tomake you feel less confident.”

Despite the dearth of Latinas in her Ph.D. program, Dunphy believes that Berkeley’s numbers are higher than the national average because of the College of Engineering’s aggressive recruitment and retention effort for underrepresented students.
For support and community, both Mayorga and Dunphy turn to the Latino Association of Graduate Students in Engineering and Science (LAGSES) of which Mayorga is president.

LAGSES focuses on recruitment and retention. Members encourage Hispanic undergrads to pursue graduate degrees in math or science and they help fellow graduate students stay in their programs.

“Being a network amongst ourselves really helps with retention because there are always people around you who know how you are feeling and what the experience is like,” says Mayorga.

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