2022 HENAAC Awards

Education: Bachelor’s, Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Santa Barbara.

From the day she joined Boeing legacy company Douglas Aircraft as a reliability engineer in 1988, to her final day on the job in the spring of 2022, Luz E. Virgen was a consistent and steadying force at Boeing. Throughout her remarkable 34 years, she consistently grew into roles of ever-increasing responsibility.

At the newly formed material improvement projects early in her career, she successfully led a team of 46 people and managed a $15 million budget. Later, as a project manager for the Lean + 10X Project, she helped improve productivity and reduce costs by $14 million – a feat so impressive that Boeing replicated it across its other divisions.

Ms. Virgen’s most enduring contributions came during her 26 impactful years with the C-17 Globemaster military transport, for which she led numerous modernization programs valued at more than $3.1 billion.  In one of her final assignments, she served as the mission director for the critical 737 MAX return to service team tasked with identifying and resolving customer issues.

Ms. Virgen immigrated from Mexico with her family when she was in middle school.  She became the first in her family to graduate from college when she completed her mechanical engineering degree from the U.C. Santa Barbara.  She credits her parents as well as her high school calculus teacher – the legendary educator Jaime Escalante – for inspiring her to excel as an engineer and to open doors for Latinos and women coming up behind her. She’s engaged and influenced countless young engineers and scientists at Boeing and continues to perform community service and outreach to K-12 and university students with the same fire that she brings to her work.

Ms. Virgen recently left Boeing to join Virgin Galactic, where she’ll apply her skills and expertise to bring space travel to the masses in the coming years.