2024 GMiS Luminaries

Education:  Masters in Business Administration, Fundação Getulio Vargas; Masters and Bachelors in Chemical Engineering, University of São Paulo (Brazil)

Over a career of nearly two decades, Juliana Francisco has been a worldwide leader for others to emulate. She’s earned the respect of her peers and superiors for not only focusing on improving her own professional skills through continuous learning along a path of becoming a better professional, but also in selflessly giving back to her profession and the community. 

Early in her career, Juliana found success as a Technical Service and Development Engineer in Brazil for several major product lines.  She took a risk volunteering for a six-month International Exchange Program in the silicones business in Michigan, and eventually moved with her family to the United States to take on a dual role in Dow’s Coatings and Performance Monomer business in Pennsylvania and as a Global Portfolio Manager.

Dow Coatings is a $4 billion annual revenue generator and a major driver of business value and innovation in North America and Asia Pacific regions. It also fuels important links to customer-facing technical teams worldwide. Juliana successfully led the process of portfolio management on behalf of business leadership, prioritizing investment based on inputs from R&D, marketing, commercial and finance. This role required her to coordinate all these functions from each geography, and then to synthesize inputs into a coherent framework that allowed the business team to make investment decisions biannually. 

As a younger team member working across offices and functions, her effective leadership and a willingness to help others earned her the trust and support of top executives through decisiveness and leadership systematically widening her network, while broadening her engineering and soft skills as well. 

Within Dow Coatings, Juliana’s Global Innovation Portfolio Leader role led her to manage nearly $3 billion per year in innovation project impact and direct engagement with most of the section’s global organization.  Such was her success that the team is still using methodologies that she created to prioritize over 100 research and development programs.

Seeking exposure to multiple assignments, geographies and product lines and a new experience that would further broaden her skills, she chose a position without a promotion as an opportunity to learn about the pipe, consumer, and adhesives markets, demonstrating a strong internal compass in the process that served her well.

Juliana remains actively engaged in defining initiatives to improve Dow’s Employee Experience index by analyzing survey data and brainstorming solutions to improve job satisfaction across the board.  She has distinguished herself as a transformational leader who develops solutions to challenging business problems, builds successful teams, and generates enormous value while promoting a more inclusive workplace for Dow.

Outside of Dow, she has spearheaded important programs for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers to develop Hispanic talent, and she’s been active leading initiatives with the Women’s Inclusion Network, an employee resource group. In this role, she drove the implementation of Power-UP, a leadership workshop to empower female leaders.