Most Promising Engineer, Undergraduate Degree

Moving abroad to pursue opportunity is nothing new for Juan D. Quintero.  When he was only 13 years old, threats from local guerrillas forced his family to uproot from their native Cali, Colombia and seek asylum in the United States.

Before then, construction was already in his blood since his family owned a general contracting firm and had Mr. Quintero playing with toy bulldozers and concrete mixers as a child.

Arriving in the U.S. without knowing any English, he persevered through high school using the mantra of school and soccer to propel him to achieving his goal of pursuing an

engineering at Georgia Tech University.

Mr. Quintero joined Chevron in 2012 after landing an interview through the local chapter of SPHE, and his first assignment took him to the Gulf of Mexico, where he worked on a critical subsea pipeline project. A design for a portion of the pipeline that he validated survived the installation stresses during its commissioning in mid 2014 and continues to operate safely along the sea floor.

He was on the move again in In March 2013, this time across the globe to Chevron’s $30 billion Wheatstone liquefied natural gas facility in Western Australia. Mr. Quintero’s achievements at Wheatstone soon landed him on the Project’s fabrication team in Malaysia, where he pioneered a tracking system that accurately captured and repaired non-conformances.

He returned stateside in 2016 before landing in his current role as a Project Manager at the El Segundo refinery in Southern California last year, where he manages a project portfolio today with total installation cost valued at $35 Million.

One of Mr. Quintero’s senior managers summed up his promise this way, saying quote - “Juan’s leadership qualities and demonstrated ability to achieve results the right way, have set him on a trajectory towards ever-increasing leadership roles at Chevron.”

Mr. Quintero’s community work began in high school where he founded the local chapter of Juntos and continues through his membership in SHPE and SOMOS, Chevron’s Hispanic employee network. He has hosted Chevron’s largest internal Hispanic annual event, the Hispanic Heritage Event, and has coached the Chevron Extreme Engineering Team.

Mr. Quintero has also earned the honor to serve as a valuable member of Chevron’s Hispanic Recruiting team at the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) National Conference in 2014, 2015, and 2019 as well as at the University of Southern California.

His community work has been impressive enough to garner him the 2008 Hitachi Foundation Yoshiyama National Award for Exemplary Service to the Community.

Married in 2018 to his wife, Iman, whom he met while working in Malaysia, Mr. Quintero believes that the ceremony was the first Colombo- Malaysian wedding in San Francisco history, another first for this extraordinary engineer.