• 2018 HENAAC Luminary •

In her role at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, Cynthia Garcia plays an integral part in the Whole Life Engineering team as a Control Account Manager.  She’s also a Reliability, Maintainability & Testability Engineer in the Tactical Systems area. Together she oversees a budget of $5.5 million and manages a staff of 27 team members developing a next-generation electro-optical systems, and ensuring that supportability designs remain on budget and on schedule.

With over 14 papers, reports and other technical documents to her credit, as well as over 10 presentations at Raytheon and external conferences and symposia during her 13-year career, Ms.Garcia has received multiple individual awards for performance.  These include several Raytheon Spot, Bright Star, and Individual Achievement Awards, a National Women of Color Award for Technology Rising Star, and a Most Promising Engineer – Undergraduate Degree Award from Great Minds in STEM.

Her strong involvement as an advocate for the Hispanic community is evident through her active participation with Raytheon’s Hispanic Organization for Leadership Association (HOLA), and her work reviewing scholarship applications for both the Hispanic Scholarship Fund and the NASA Motivating Undergraduates in Science and Technology (MUST)  program.

Born in El Paso, Texas to a working-class Mexican immigrant family, Ms. Garcia wasn’t certain that she would be able to afford a college education.  Her strong academic record, however, helped her get six scholarships that, combined with Pell Grants and summer jobs, paid her tuition at New Mexico State University. There she continued a stellar record of academic achievement and earned spots on the National Dean’s List and the Dean’s Honor List in the College of Engineering. She was also initiated into the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, the Phi Eta Sigma National Honor Society, and named a Crimson Scholar at the College of Engineering.

After being awarded her B.S. in Chemical Engineering, Ms. Garcia joined Raytheon and began her rise through the ranks, garnering a coveted position in Raytheon’s Leadership Development Program and completing the Johns Hopkins University Masters in Systems Engineering Program while working full-time.