This multimedia display in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month is a collaborative effort by
Cherry Creek School District High School Libraries.
For more information about this display, please contact the librarian at your high school.
If you are not part of the Cherry Creek School District, please email us.
Cherry Creek School District High School Libraries.
For more information about this display, please contact the librarian at your high school.
If you are not part of the Cherry Creek School District, please email us.
Week 4: STEM
Vanessa Galvez - Civil Engineer
Influential engineers don’t always create technologies for spacecrafts. Some, like Vanessa Galvez, have made an out-of-this-world impact in their own community. Galvez is a civil engineer who became interested in engineering when watching a documentary about levee failures after Hurricane Katrina. At age 26, she supervised the installation of 164 bioswales in Queens, NY. Bioswales help mitigate the toxins and pollutants in urban stormwater runoff, which will protect the borough from pollution and flooding. Galvez’s work can provide a blueprint for future city improvement projects, and it is hugely important to Queens, creating a safe and clean environment for generations to come.
Vanessa Galvez sources: NYC.gov Photo credit: NYC.gov |
Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski - Physicist
The world’s “next Albert Einstein” is a cubana from Chicago – at least that’s how Harvard University describes Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski. At just 24 years old, the physicist has a résumé that even veterans of her field can’t match. Gonzalez Pasterski, who’s a doctoral student at the ivy league studying high energy physics, started showing signs that she’d break barriers in 2003, back when the then-10-year-old started taking flying lessons. Three years later, she started to build her first kit aircraft. By 2008, it was considered airworthy.
These days, Gonzalez Pasterski, who studies black holes and spacetime, particularly trying to explain gravity within the context of quantum mechanics, has been cited by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Andrew Strominger, been offered jobs by NASA and Blue Origin, an aerospace research and development company Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos also started. She’s also received hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to support her work. |
Dr. Helen Rodriguez - Medical Doctor
Dr. Trias was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York City. As a child, she experienced bias for simply being Latina and was “placed in a class with students who were academically handicapped, even though she had good grades and knew how to speak English,” according to Wikipedia. Dr. Trias later went on to graduate from medical school at Universidad de Puerto Rico with highest honors. Her accomplishments include founding the first center for newborn children in Puerto Rico and serving as Director of Pediatrics at Lincoln Hospital in South Bronx, NY. In addition, Dr. Trias went on to lead the New York City Department of Health Mental Hygiene. She helped “bring national attention to the devastation caused by HIV and AIDS among inner city mothers and children. In 1993, the American Public Health Association elected her their first Latina president.”
(http://www.nps.gov/latino/latinothemestudy/sciencemedicine.htm). |
Jaime Escalante - Math Educator
This Bolivian-born teacher is renowned for his work with struggling math students. His story was chronicled in the 1988 Hollywood film, Stand and Deliver. He moved to Los Angeles in the 1960s and worked in inner-city schools. In 1974, he began teaching at a tough East L.A. school, Garfield High, and started an advanced math class, something unprecedented for Los Angeles Latino schools at the time.
Biography.com notes that in n 1982, Mr. Escalante’s “largest class of students took and passed an advanced placement test in Calculus.” When some students’ test scores were invalidated by testing company due to cheating allegations, “Escalante protested, saying that the students had been disqualified because they were Hispanic and from a poor school.” Students were later allowed to retake the test and passed, proving the “cheating” claims were false (http://www.biography.com/people/jaime-escalante-189368). |
Zaida Hernandez-Irisson - Electrical Engineer
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