Inclusion/Exclusion

Family History

Brazil has a special place in my heart: I owe my existence to a chance encounter in 1976 between a Costa Rican woman in her late twenties pursuing a master’s degree in education, determined to make a better future for herself, and an Irish math PhD student who was following his advisor on their sabbatical at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. After marrying in late 1978, my parents moved to Moravia, a suburb of San José, Costa Rica, where my mother had lived all her life until she went to study in Brazil. I grew up in a house built on the same modest plot of land owned by my great-grandfather; my father, Joseph, still lives there today. My mother lost a six-year battle with cancer in 2002.

Her name was Jesusita, although most friends and family knew her as Susy. Jesusita de los Ángeles Alvarado Blanco, to be more precise. It is an unusual name, even by Latin American standards. My maternal grandmother, Julia Blanco Rojas, had been told she would have difficulty conceiving; she prayed and promised God that if she had a child she would name him Jesús. When my mother was born, Julia pivoted. My grandfather, Augusto Alvarado Montero, the oldest of five children, had many jobs in his life, including stints in his late teens picking bananas for the United Fruit Company on the Atlantic coast. He made good money doing this1 much of which he sent home to help pay for the education of his siblings. He never got to go to college.

I didn’t meet either one of my maternal grandparents. Julia died of ovarian cancer in 1965, when my mom was 15; Augusto followed in 1973, from a stroke. Julia had a second child, my uncle Enrique, but he died young, and so by age 24 my mother’s immediate family was gone. [2] She had already completed a bachelor’s degree in science education at the Universidad de Costa Rica [3] and taught high-school chemistry at the Liceo Vicente Lachner in Cartago. A government scholarship allowed her to go to Brazil and get a master’s degree; she jumped at the opportunity, and began learning Portuguese in preparation for the trip.

Picking up Portuguese as a Spanish speaker is not too hard. My father Joseph, however, did not speak Spanish in 1976. But he is a quick study, and he loves to learn new languages. His path to Campinas was in some ways even more unlikely than my mother’s. He grew up in Dungloe, a small town in northwestern Ireland, the son of a policeman (and my namesake) and a homemaker, Nan Varilly (née Boyle). He is one of five siblings, all of whom worked hard to move up the socio-economic ladder from rather humble beginnings. By age 12, my father was out of the house, attending a boarding school in Letterkenny on a scholarship. Unable to attend Trinity College in Dublin [4] on account of being Catholic, [5] he studied mathematics at University College Dublin. There, he found a home and was well-supported by mentors like Seán Dineen. At age 21, he left his native Ireland for the United States, where he enrolled as a PhD student in mathematics at the University of Rochester. On Dineen’s advice, he began working with Leopoldo Nachbin, a Brazilian mathematician who had been in turn a student of Laurent Schwartz. When Nachbin asked him if he wanted to go to Brazil in 1976, my father gladly accepted the offer. [6]

Shortly after I was born, my parents decided to tear down the old house in Moravia where my mom had lived, and build a new house together. They timed their project just right: following some ill-advised monetary policy by then-president Rodrigo Carazo Odio, Costa Rica experienced a serious bout of inflation; the price of a sack of cement increased seven-fold during construction, forcing my parents to scale back their plans. By the end of the project, they were left with little disposable income. My mom often credited the guayaba and cas trees in the backyard for helping my parents get through the economic crisis, but I never understood exactly how. [7] I remember her being emotional when we had to cut down the cas tree in 1987; I was too young to understand the mixed feelings she felt towards it.

The struggles my parents experienced as they navigated the difficult economic turmoil of the 1980s were invisible to me. I was a happy kid; I loved to kick a ball around, though I was no good at it, and I collected Bazooka Bubble Gum tattoos. I entered kindergarten at the British School of Costa Rica in 1985, four years after the school began operating, and I graduated from it in 1998, having completed an International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma. The British School is a small private school; my parents were determined to give my siblings and me the best education they could, and they wanted us to all grow up bilingual. Through most of my childhood and teenage years, my parents spent over half of their income on our education. It was a privilege and a sacrifice that we neither understood nor squandered. My mother had a few maxims she drilled into all of us. The most important one was perhaps Papito, lo que tenga que hacer en esta vida, hágalo bien, [8] but a close second was Papito, cuando yo me muera no hay herencia, sólo su educación. [9]

Early Education

When I was in ninth grade, on a totally ordinary morning at school, my math teacher, Paul Murray, changed my life. Right before the beginning of first period, he intercepted me on my way to class, catching his breath, and asked me to follow him. He explained that that day was the first round of the Costa Rican Math Olympiad and that the school wanted to send five students from tenth grade to it. But one of the designated team members had not shown up. “Wanna go?” Being a goodie-two-shoes, I explained to him that I did not have permission to skip class. He rolled his eyes, pointed to a bus, and said, “Just get on the bus with the rest of the team, will ya? I’ll take care of the rest.”

I was good at math as a kid. Part of me felt like I had to be since my dad was a math professor at the University of Costa Rica. But I had never thought much of it. That morning, when I got to the first round of the Costa Rican Math Olympiad, something changed. I remember struggling for the first time. There were only 30 questions, for three hours, and they were multiple choice! But I had never seen problems like these. They required you to think in a way that school had never really challenged me. Some questions I could tell I simply didn’t have the background for, but other questions were within my reach if I only spent time toying and struggling with them. It was exhilarating.

Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I was obsessed with astronomy. My contact with the subject came mostly from books at the University of Costa Rica’s library and the odd purchase of Astronomy magazine, of which only a few copies could be found throughout the country, at ridiculous prices; I never owned a telescope. There was no visible professional community around the subject in Costa Rica, and this reality slowly eroded my dream of becoming an astronomer. I began drifting towards subjects more grounded in reality, like civil engineering, even though my heart was not in them. Math Olympiads, together with a role model and coach in my dad, rekindled my love of abstract subjects, of the pursuit of knowledge as its own end. I have been lucky and privileged in this regard, having been raised by supportive parents who nurtured and respected my hopes for the future.

International students in the United States often pay full tuition in college. Under ordinary circumstances, my parents did not make enough money to pay these kinds of sums, but by 1998, circumstances were not ordinary. My mother was being treated at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, without U.S. health insurance. She would fly to Houston once a month for treatment. The hospital gave her many financial breaks, and the British School gave my brother and me a significant scholarship so we could keep attending school and finish out the IB program, but the financial strain on the family was immense. I had originally set my sights on studying abroad in England. But the fees for overseas students were simply out of my family’s means. So I started looking into American universities, armed with AltaVista, the leading search engine of the day. It soon became clear that some universities awarded need-based financial aid, even to international students. All of them, however, were very difficult to get into: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, etc.

I’ll never know exactly what the admissions officers at Harvard saw in my application. I filled it out by hand, wrote my college essay in 45 minutes, and in the page dedicated to summer activities (usually packed by most students with summer camps, internships at companies and research labs, sports and musical pursuits), I wrote “Not Applicable” and left the rest of the page blank. To be sure, I was a good student, very academically inclined, but so are many other thousands of applicants. I had written a small paper on triangle geometry for the extended essay component of the International Baccalaureate, which I attached to my application. Perhaps it helped? I thought I bombed the in-person interview, though I later came to realize that my interviewer, Renata Villers, a Harvard alum, must have gone to bat for me in a serious way.

Higher Education

College years. I arrived in the United States on September 9, 1999, aged 19 and eager to study mathematics. My first semester at Harvard was rough. I felt like I was drinking out of a fire hydrant the whole time. I took Math 25: Honors Calculus and linear algebra, which wasn’t the hardest class offered to freshmen (that was Math 55), and for the first time in my life I really struggled with math, but not in the “fun struggle” kind of way. I began doubting if math was for me after all. The professor, Kalle Karu, was phenomenal, so I figured I was the problem. I confessed my anxiety to my parents, who encouraged me to keep at it, to give my dream of studying math a chance until the end of the year. At the beginning of my sophomore year, my doubts hadn’t gone away, so I began the year by taking some applied math courses, as well as physical chemistry. I loved those courses, but in the end, they made me realize how much I missed proof-based mathematics. By the fourth semester of college I was back as a math major, and I took abstract algebra from Barry Mazur and topology
from Curt McMullen. Both were awe-inspiring instructors (and world-class mathematicians, though I didn’t fully grasp this at the time). They rekindled my love for the subject.

Looking back at freshman year, I think the problem was one of time. I worked in the dish room of Annenberg Hall, the freshman dining hall, doing shifts on Monday, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, from 4:30 pm to 8:30 pm. By the time I got home, I was physically exhausted and had a hard time focusing on homework. Like many other international students and students from underrepresented backgrounds, I took on the campus job that paid the highest hourly wage. More savvy students took on library desk jobs, where they essentially got paid to do homework. I changed course my sophomore year when I became eligible to be a course assistant in the math department, though I lamented leaving Annenberg Hall; the staff there worked fantastically hard though their efforts seemed barely noticed by the surrounding students. But if I wanted to be able to rise to the same mathematical level as my peers who didn’t have campus jobs, I realized I needed to take on a job that was more compatible with school work. I was fortunate to find such a job.

Harvard taught me a lot of things; it was a humbling experience, to say the least. Its pressure-cooker environment is not for the faint of heart, but meeting people who are much smarter than you in what you consider your strongest suit is both disorienting and good for you. It made me realize that I liked to do mathematics because I loved the subject, not because I was decent at it. I learned that in the long run hard work will take you much further than innate talent. I also learned that meritocracy is a myth, having graduated in 2003 in the same class as Jared Kushner.

My mother died on July 8, 2002, the summer between my junior and senior years of college. That fall, my brother Patrick started college at MIT. Through sheer determination and will power, my mother beat the life expectancy cancer sentenced her to by more time than any of us thought possible. At her funeral, several of her co-workers remarked to me that she had lived to see her dream of making sure her children went off to college.

If I could go back and have a do-over, I would approach college much differently. I was hard-headed, and I almost never went to office hours (this was a serious mistake). I loved working with other people, which was great, but when the time came to apply for graduate school, there were very few professors who knew me well enough to write a strong letter of recommendation. I’ve now chaired the PhD admissions committee in the Rice Math Department for six years; so I know that letters of recommendation are probably the most important part of an application. You need letters from professors who know you well, who can speak to your potential for completing a good PhD thesis. It all worked out in the end for me, but this is part of where a bit of luck and the privilege of coming from a top-ranked school with good grades have played an important role in my life.

Graduate school. When I started graduate school at UC Berkeley in fall 2004, I had no idea what research was like in math. Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) were not widespread in the early 2000s, and in any case international students were not eligible for National Science Foundation (NSF) stipends. Still, there were hurdles to be overcome before starting on research. For me, the hardest one was the advanced oral exam. I do well on written exams, but I freeze up on oral exams. To this day, when I am asked a question during a talk, I have to pause for a moment, breathe in and out a few times, and force myself to stop thinking that I am not thinking about an answer. My oral exam was rocky, to say the least. I passed it, though only because about an hour in I was certain I had failed, so I calmed down and was able to finally start thinking clearly.

Towards the end of my second year in graduate school, I proved my first research-level result. It was a small proposition, something I needed for a project. I remember the moment distinctly: I proved something that people didn’t know already. It was a modest contribution to the sum total of human knowledge, but it was a contribution, and I was the author! That was the moment I finally believed I can do this! From there on out, I worked really hard on my thesis and a couple of side projects. Not everything panned out, and there were moments of intense frustration, anxiety, and anger at myself. I was extremely fortunate to have a strong group of friends in graduate school, including Dan Erman, Bianca Viray, and David Zureick-Brown; we supported each other through thick and thin. I also met some wonderful people who were a little older than me, at the postdoc stage, mostly at conferences, like Damiano Testa, Ronald van Luijk, and Mauricio Velasco. I learned a lot from them, and we collaborated in projects. There is no need to go at it alone. I learned this lesson serendipitously.

We do not choose our families. But we do have a lot of say on who we let mentor us. Mentors really matter. You need many of them: no one person has all the answers and all the advice that is appropriate at all stages of your life and career. I have had many people I gladly count as mentors. Among them, my thesis advisor, Bjorn Poonen, and my postdoctoral advisor, Brendan Hassett, really stand out. I knew I wanted to work with Bjorn ten minutes after I, as a prospective student, met him. I asked him about his research, and in order to answer me, he asked three questions back, to calibrate the state of my mathematical knowledge, without judgement. Once he knew what level to pitch his answer, I was blown away by what he told me. At the time, I didn’t understand that I was drawn to Bjorn because he is a fantastic communicator. I love the area I work in, but I could have been happy doing many other things. Your relationship with an advisor is lifelong and is particularly intense during graduate school. Making sure the match between people is right is much more important than pursuing some specific subject. When picking a mentor, you should pick the person, not the subject.

One thing that helped keep me sane through graduate school was a stable personal life. Throughout graduate school, I lived with my girlfriend, Sarah, a wonderful, caring, ambitious and supportive human being, who helped me navigate the ups and downs of graduate school. There was a semester early on where we had to live off of my $1,200 month stipend in the Bay Area (rent was $950/month), while Sarah looked for a job. Although at our poorest, I remember those months as some of the happiest of our relationship. We got married in 2010, though as sometimes happens, we grew apart and divorced a few years later. This of course was a difficult time, but I was already a tenured professor, and my work could absorb the personal shock to the system.

Postdoctoral years. When I finished graduate school, I had some good offers for postdocs. One of them was at University of Georgia (UGA), another was at Rice. I happened to be visiting Atlanta while deciding where to go; a conversation with Danny Krashen helped me sort things out. Danny was trying to convince me to come to UGA. All I remember is that at one point he said, “OK, the truth is that there is no better mentor for you than Brendan Hassett [at Rice], but […]” I honestly don’t remember the end of the sentence. That moment crystallized things for me. I knew in my heart of hearts that Danny was right and that Brendan would be a great, if demanding, mentor. I took the job at Rice the next morning, on my way back to California. Years later I told Danny this story, and he gave out a big laugh. He told me something similar had happened to him earlier in life, and he was happy to have (inadvertently) paid it forward.

Some of Brendan’s best advice came early on: “don’t stall, keep moving,” meaning prove the best results you can, but don’t hold off until things are optimal before releasing them to the world, at least not when you are a postdoc. Also, be proactive in your search for new research problems to work on. The other piece of advice was “don’t move away abruptly from what you know, work by analytic continuation,” meaning take advantage of what you know already, and move towards where you want to be slowly, writing papers along the way. I can very easily trace a path between a paper I wrote on Zariski density of rational points on del Pezzo surfaces over number fields and a paper constructing pluri-canonical forms on moduli spaces of special cubic fourfolds (there are four papers in between). It’d be hard to find a conference with talks in these two topics. Related to this, don’t spend six months learning an entire subject from the ground up because you might need it for a paper. Chances are you’ll eventually realize the idea won’t work, you’ll have six fewer months to write papers before you apply for tenure-track jobs, and no new paper to show for your six months of work.

Brendan also taught me a lot about being a professional mathematician, about having long-term goals in mind, and problems of various sizes around those goals. I also learned a lot about taste from him (although this word was never used in our conversations). I learned that just because you have a hammer, and you see some nails in the distance, it may not be worth your time to go hammer those nails unless you have a good reason to do so. Our time is finite, and everyone succumbs to finitude. As you get older, you get more picky about the problems you work on, not because other problems are not interesting, but because each choice of a project closes doors on other choices. I cannot improve on David Foster Wallace on this point, so I will simply quote him wholesale:

Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, […] it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them. [10]

My own outlook on life is nowhere near as gloomy as DFW’s. I feel only gratitude for the privilege that I do something that I truly love that I get to share with students and colleagues. I have forfeited many other careers, some much more lucrative than my own. But I have no regrets about my choices. I once asked Ryan Hynd what he would do today if it were his last day on Earth. Without missing a heartbeat, he said, “same thing I had planned on doing this morning. And if that’s not your answer, then what the hell are you doing with your life?”

Tenure-Track and Beyond

In late 2011, I applied for tenure track jobs. There was a job opening at Rice, and even though it was a dream to stay there on a more permanent basis, it is highly unusual in mathematics for an institution to hire one of its postdocs into a tenure-track position. On a late Friday afternoon in mid-November, David Damanik, then the head of the appointments committee, knocked on my door and asked me if I was interested in interviewing for a tenure-track position at Rice. I’m not sure I kept my cool, but I immediately told him I’d love to.

“Good. How about Monday?”
This was a bit shocking and caught me unprepared. I mumbled something about teaching two classes on Monday.
“OK. Tuesday then?”

Realizing I could not delay the future much longer, I took the date. The interview went as well as it could have, though I didn’t hear back about an offer until February. I was not the top choice for the job, and that’s OK. I’ve never felt like I have a chip on my shoulder for that. Every year, hundreds of people apply for each available tenure-track position at a research-intensive university. I was under no illusions that I was somehow the department’s top choice for a position, though I did feel like I could rise to the challenge of the job. The top choice candidate could only take one job; thankfully, they didn’t want the job I dreamed of taking.

I earned tenure in 2016, and in 2019, ten years after setting foot at Rice as a newly minted PhD to take on a G. C. Evans instructorship, I was promoted from Associate Professor to Full Professor. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that that’s what the future held in store for me when I first arrived in Houston. [11] Although I have worked tirelessly to get to where I am today, I recognize the luck and the privilege that have smoothed out my journey, and the sacrifices my forebearers made so that I could have opportunities to thrive. With a seat at the table, I now have the chance to help others thrive. I do not intend to waste the chance.

Today I live in Houston with my partner Carey, a smart, thoughtful, kind, and independent person I am happy to share my life with. We have both suffered loss in our previous marriages, and this perspective, afforded by failure, pushes us to make sure we don’t fall into the same traps of the past, or revisit mistakes. Before the COVID-19 pandemic we used to enjoy the arts and music scene in Houston, and we traveled together extensively. The pandemic brought a lot of our activities to a screeching halt, but we have found new hobbies together.

Research

Most of my work to date is in an area called arithmetic geometry. I study Diophantine equations through a geometric lens. Perhaps the most famous Diophantine problem is Fermat’s Last Theorem, which states that the only solutions to

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ; n ≥ 3

are those for which xyz = 0 (i.e., at least one of x, y, or z must be zero). A decade before Wiles gave his spectacular proof of this result, arithmetic geometers already had good reasons to believe that Fermat’s Last Theorem is true: for each n, the Fermat equation defines an algebraic curve on the projective plane, and the general theory of curves already showed that, for each n ≥ 4, there could be at most finitely many solutions to Fermat’s equation. For a detailed explanation of how this is the case, I invite you to watch my talk at the 2020 Joint Mathematics Meeting titled The Geometric Disposition of Diophantine Equations. [12]

I’ve spent the better part of the last ten years studying equations that give rise to geometric objects called K3 surfaces. One of the most incredible surprises of my life has been a collaboration with people coming from electrical engineering, government security, and coding theory, to develop a geometric framework behind efficient systems for cloud storage, using K3 surfaces! I never expected that my knowledge reservoir on algebraic surfaces would be helpful in applications. Most projects I’ve worked on had applications internal only to mathematics when I began them, but now I’ve found that people from many kinds of applied fields can use these tools. I am currently working with earth scientists, using algebraic geometry to understand micro-layers of the earth’s mantle from earthquake data! Theoretical mathematics has a lot to contribute to the world, but you have to understand it at a deep level in order to make the connections to the world around us.

I have the rare privilege of having a father who is also a mathematician. He works on non-commutative differential geometry. Our work within mathematics is quite distant, but we share a common basic language that allows us to explain to each other our recent papers. In 2017, we finally converged in a conference, the Mathematical Congress of the Americas, in Montreal. And in 2020 he came to Denver to watch the lecture linked to above, which was an invited address of the American Mathematical Society at the Joint Math Meetings. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to share this connection with him.

Conclusion and Advice

Some advice is peppered throughout the narrative above. Rather than rehash it all, I’ll offer some further pointers for different stages of an academic career.

Undergraduate years. Less is more: fewer math classes, done excellently. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Early on, take proof-based linear algebra, abstract algebra, real analysis, and if possible a course in point-set topology (not all at the same time, of course!). Go to office hours. Connect meaningfully with your professors. Always ask why. To quote Ravi Vakil: “What is a group?” is not a great question. A better question is “Why is a group?” Whenever you meet a new definition, play with it through examples and ask yourself: why would anyone think it’d be a good idea to formally codify this concept?

Graduate school. The first year will be brutal. Hang in there. When you get over the hurdles of written and oral qualifying exams, your world will be turned inside out: up to this point, the pressure to get things done has been external, framed by structured coursework, homework, exams, etc. Now it’s up to you to generate some internal fire to work on a research project. Think of it like a full-time job. Make sure you put in 40 hours of work per week. Above all, don’t go through it alone: find a group of friends who can act as a support network. Read and criticize each others’ work. When you look for an advisor, choose the person, not the subject.

Postdoctoral years. This is a hard, lonely time, with new mountains of responsibility. A good match with a postdoctoral mentor is key, but keep in mind that they are not your thesis advisor. Work hard, but take personal days regularly. Write all the papers you can, at the sweet spot intersection of interesting, feasible and within (or just beyond) your reach. Lean on your mentor to help choose projects.

Tenure-track years. Keep your eye on the ball. Minimize committee work. Keep writing papers. Enjoy the flow. Otherwise, why are you doing this?

Tenure. Keep moving. Time to give back. You will be busier than ever before, but in a good way. Mathematics requires community. You are now in a position to effect changes in that community, and by doing so, improve it. Do so.

Related to this last bit of advice, and perhaps most counterintuitively: be a bit selfish during your development as a mathematician. We Latinx people have strong family cultures, and often seek out opportunities to give back to a community that has given us so much. You will do so, in due course. First, get a seat at the table. From there you will be able to help more people than you ever dreamed of.

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[1] This is not to say that the working conditions were good; see the chapter A la sombra del banano in Carlos Luis Fallas’s novel Mamita Yunai, originally published in 1940. (Yunai is a transliteration of Uni(-ted), the way in which most Costa Ricans referred to the United Fruit Company.)
[2] My mother had a stepsister, my aunt Nelly, who was 15 years older. For reasons that were never clear to me, they were not close in the 1970s. Whatever the rift was, time helped heal the wound, so I grew up with an aunt and older cousins whom I’ve always been fond of.
[3] My mom was never one to complain much, but I do recall a certain amount of bitterness when she talked about her college years: textbooks were both difficult to find, and often unaffordable, so she had to work off of her lecture notes as the sole course materials. The situation today has partially improved—textbooks are not as hard to find.
[4] Trinity College alumni include George Berkeley, Edmund Burke, Samuel Beckett, William Hamilton, Erwin Schrödinger, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, and many others.
[5] The restriction was counterintuitive: only after 1970 did the Catholic Church stop forbidding believers from attending Trinity College without special dispensation.
[6] Keen readers will note that the Mathematical Genealogy Project lists Gérard Emch as my father’s PhD advisor. This is correct; things didn’t work out in the end with Nachbin, and my father switched advisors halfway through graduate school.
[7] After showing my father a first draft of this testimonio, he explained: each night for some time, he and my mother would collect the windfall cases and guayabas and sell them to the local grocer. This would pay for the next day’s bus fares to their workplaces.
[8] “Whatever you have to do in this life, do it well.” My father would usually abbreviate it this to “whatever you do, do it well,” although his favorite version, following Robert Heinlein, is “anything worth doing is worth overdoing.”
[9] “When I die, there is no inheritance, only your education.”
[10] This little reflection is embedded in A supposedly fun thing I will never do again.
[11] As it happens, Houston already had a special place in my heart, even though I had never been to it: attentive readers will recall that my mother was treated at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (without U.S. health insurance!) for the last few years of her life.
[12] A link to the talk is provided here: youtube.com/watch?v=GnE2lFJ1x-Y.

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Previous Testimonios:

• Dr. James A. M. Álvarez
• Dr. Federico Ardila Mantilla
• Dr. Selenne Bañuelos
• Dr. Erika Tatiana Camacho
• Dr. Anastasia Chavez
• Dr. Minerva Cordero
• Dr. Ricardo Cortez
• Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera
• Dr. Jessica M. Deshler
• Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton
• Dr. Alexander Díaz-López
• Dr. Stephan Ramon Garcia
• Dr. Ralph R. Gomez
• Dr. Victor H. Moll
• Dr. Ryan R. Mouruzzi, Jr.
• Dr. Cynthia Oropesa Anhalt
• Dr. Omayra Ortega
• Dr. José A. Perea
• Dr. Angel Ramón Pineda Fortín
• Dr. Hortensia Soto
• Dr. Roberto Soto
• Dr. Richard A. Tapia
• Dr. Tatiana Toro

My Story—Made in America [1]

Frankly, if you don’t know me, you may be wondering why you should care about my life or my work. In a nutshell, I have succeeded—against all odds—well beyond what anyone, including me, but excluding my wife and mother, ever would have dreamed. In 2017, the Houston Chronicle featured what they called the 36 most fascinating individuals in Houston. There I was, proudly next to Simone Biles [2] and her four Olympic gold medals. I hold the highest academic position at Rice University—University Professor—only the sixth person to hold this position in the 100-year history of the university and of course, the first Hispanic. The Blackwell-Tapia Mathematics Conference and the Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference are named in my honor. I have received eight honorary doctorates from prestigious universities and given eight commencement addresses.

I was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. President Clinton presented me with the inaugural Presidential Award for Mentoring in 1996, and in 2011, President Obama honored me with the National Medal of Science, the highest award given by the U.S. government to an American scientist or engineer; in 2014, I won the prestigious Vannevar Bush Award from the National Science Board; in February of 2017, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) awarded me the Public Engagement in Science Award.

For all of these awards, I was the first U.S.-born Hispanic recipient. I say all this not to brag, but to convince you of my credibility. I marvel at what an individual can do in America. Yes, I have lived the American Dream, but it was without the apple pie. I call my life story “Made in America” because even though I have a Mexican heritage, I was molded in America and feel American.

I embrace the word Tejano, popularized by the late Selena, [3] and closely identify with the Tejanos. After all, I have lived in Texas for half a century; however, I was born and raised in California, so I can never be accepted as a true Tejano. Hence, I am both an honorary Mexican and an honorary Tejano. I am proud to say that here I am in my early 80s and I consider the four papers that I have recently written in my late 70s the best papers of my entire career. That is the way we minorities are. We often start late (I got my PhD at age 30) and get better with age. I have always loved mathematics, and in return mathematics has been very good to me. It has given me wonderful opportunities and much satisfaction.

My Family

My parents Maria Magdalena Angulo (Magda) and Amado Bernal Tapia came as impoverished children from Mexico to Los Angeles seeking an education. Times were hard, as they had to support themselves and were not able to obtain the education that they sought. My mother came to Los Angeles alone, and lived with and was influenced by a Jewish family from the age of 12 to the age of 19, when she married. A similar story applies to my father, but in his case the family was Japanese. My mother went no further than middle school, my father finished high school. However, my parents’ educational dreams were fulfilled through their children. I have a twin brother, Bobby; a sister four years younger, Ana; a sister, Rebecca (Becky), who is seven years younger; and a brother, Steve, who is seventeen years younger. [4] Out of five children, four of us have undergraduate degrees and three of us have graduate degrees. I am a product of these Mexican parents, the city of Los Angeles, and the time period of the 1960s. My father worked extremely long hours—often leaving the house for work before we got up and returning after we had gone to bed. They were hard working, good people who came here for better lives and they found them. They certainly gave as much to this country as they received from it.

Although my parents were so very proud of being Mexican—while their hearts probably remained in Mexico—they adapted well to the new world and definitely made it work for their children. My father was inclusive, and everyone loved him. To this day my wife Jean claims that he is one of the people she loved most. While not everyone loved my mother as much as they loved my father, everyone respected her. She was well focused and strongly directed. As I reflect on my mother’s teachings, I summarize them as: 1) Be proud; 2) Believe that you can (sí se puede); 3) Demonstrate good work habits; 4) Strive for global excellence.

School Days

In the winter of 1943, Bobby and I started kindergarten at Dayton Heights Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and not far from our house in central Los Angeles. We were well groomed, but our dress style was outdated and we looked different from our male classmates. Our teacher Marjorie seemed to be quite fond of Bobby and me, and we felt it. The experience was a pleasant one, as we mostly listened to stories and played games with the other kids. On the other hand, Mrs. Anson’s first-grade class was a different story. Bobby and I would not join in group singing or participate in any oral activities. We were extremely shy and much more comfortable speaking Spanish than speaking English, but the language of the class was 100% English. Mrs. Anson called our mother to ask if Bobby, the quieter of the two of us, had any speech problems. Of course, she said no and decided that we would start speaking English at home.

We moved to Torrance from central Los Angeles in the summer of 1946. While our house had a mailing address of Torrance, California, it was technically in the Los Angeles Strip, a narrow region that runs from Los Angeles to San Pedro. At the time, the Strip was not well developed and was heavily populated with so-called “Okies.” [5] We started school in Torrance (actually in Carson) in September of 1946 at Carson Street Elementary. The next year we were zoned to Halldale Avenue Elementary School in Torrance. As I reflect, I remember good things about Halldale. Our fourth-grade teacher was Mrs. Bentwood. She was the best teacher in the world. Realizing that Bobby and I were shy, she tried hard to bring us out. We were the only Mexican-Americans in the class (school). Whenever in reading or social studies we would encounter a Spanish word, she would ask either me or Bobby to pronounce it correctly in front of the class. When we would do math, she would excuse me from the new material saying that I already knew it and she would have me tutor the students who were behind. She made us feel good about who we were, perhaps for the first time in school.

Bobby and I later went to Narbonne High School in Lomita, California for both middle school and high school. Due to crowded conditions, the middle school went in the afternoon and the high school in the morning. So, Bobby and I were free in the afternoons during our high school days. We spent all our afternoons and evenings working on cars, reading hot rod magazines, and listening to early 1950s music. Our passion was cars and drag racing. Bobby became a world-class driver and was elected to the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) driver Hall of Fame.

Narbonne was an extremely low-performing school, arguably the lowest in the district. In spite of my low-performing school, I did well academically, especially in mathematics, and was considered a star. Yet no one—no teacher, nor any counselor—ever suggested that I could or should attend college. Few students from Narbonne went to college. Low expectations have hurt so many potentially excellent minority students.

In eleventh grade, the American Mathematical Society promoted mathematics appreciation among local Los Angeles high schools by administering a mathematics test to each school. The schools with high participation rates would be acknowledged. During an assembly, Principal Barnett encouraged participation by saying that the individual with the best score at Narbonne High School would be acknowledged and given an award in an assembly in front of the entire school. This was exciting. I took first place. Mr. Barnett called me to his office and said, “Congratulations, here is your pin.” I immediately asked, “But what about the assembly?” He replied, “There will be no assembly.” This deeply hurt me. I was so much looking forward to shining in front of the entire school. To this day, I am confused as to why there was no assembly. I even entertained the ridiculous thought that it was because I was a rare Mexican-American in an “Okie” school.

Pursuing Higher Education

Since no one encouraged me to pursue higher education, after graduating from Narbonne in January of 1956 I went to work in a muffler factory. I was happy working in the hot sun next to an individual from Mississippi who told me “Richard, do not make my mistake. You are smart, go to college.” By the end of summer I could take no more and ran off to Harbor Junior College (HJC) in Wilmington, California in September of 1956.

I have fond memories of Professor Friedman’s calculus class at HJC. Several of my friends and I would sit in the last row. Every Friday we had a 20-point quiz. I would get 20 points, my neighbor would get 19 points, and the next neighbor would get 18 points, on down the line. Friedman explained the difference in scores by saying that the person that originated the answer got the most points, then the person who got it next would get second highest, et cetera.

During my time in junior college I met Jean, my future wife, on April 21, Easter Sunday, of 1957. She was 15, about to turn 16, and I had just turned 19. We dated extensively through the summer of ‘57 and in September, her mother sent her to New York to continue her ballet studies at New York City Ballet. In Christmas of 1957, a friend of mine and I, at the spur of the moment, decided to drive to New York to visit Jean. I got back late and missed an exam in Professor Friedman’s calculus class. Since I had never received a B in a math class, he said that he would give me an A in the course if I scored 100% on his final. There were five questions, I easily did four. But I did not know how to do the fifth. So, I thought and thought and finally came up with an approach. Friedman was not confident that the approach was correct and gave me no credit for that problem. I asked him to tell me what was wrong with my approach. After a day or two, he gave me full credit saying I had rediscovered an old theorem that was not well known.

Professor Friedman was perhaps the best math professor I have ever had; he told me to not go to a state school, but go to UCLA after junior college; so I did, in the Fall of 1958. At UCLA they told me that I could have been accepted with scholarship help if I had applied out of high school. No one ever told me that or even hinted at that. But there I was at UCLA, what a wonderful occurrence. I was a math star in high school and in junior college, but not at UCLA. I was just good enough. I survived by working hard for the first time in my life.

My path to graduate school was not certain or smooth. As an undergraduate math student at UCLA, I was an A-B student, but mostly B’s. I had no illusions of going to graduate school on the strength of this record. In my senior year, two of my classmates told me that they were applying to the UCLA Mathematics Department for graduate school. I knew that I had done better and had more mathematical talent than both of them, so I applied and was accepted.

But there was a problem. I had married as a sophomore and had a daughter as a junior, and Jean and I supported ourselves by working part-time. We were really broke. Moreover, I had taken out several student loans for my undergraduate education, forcing me to delay my acceptance and work for a year and a half. In that time, I worked for Todd Shipyards in San Pedro, California, on a grant from the United States Navy’s Bureau of Ships. The project consisted in using mathematics to define the surface of a ship. When the project finished in 1963, I returned to UCLA for graduate school. The Todd Shipyard experience reinforced my view that I needed a PhD in order to take a leading role in interesting projects. The time I was in graduate school at UCLA, from 1963 to 1968, was an exciting period in U.S. history, especially in California. The 1960s was my favorite decade and it was as wild and exciting as people say it was. Until this time, I knew that I was Mexican-American, but at UCLA in graduate school, I became Chicano.

Of the nearly 300 graduate students in the UCLA Mathematics Department, I was the only domestic Latino. That did not really bother me because few Latinos attended my high school. When I started graduate school, there was one Black student. Naturally, we became friends, but he was a victim of the qualifying exams and had to leave UCLA. Classwork seemed fairly routine. I was not a star in class, but I was good enough.

For two years of graduate school, I had no financial support from the department, so Jean and I worked part-time, staggering our hours so one of us was always with our young daughter, Circee. I worked part-time as a supplemental (student) employee for IBM in Westwood Village near UCLA. And on weekends, I worked for my father at La Fleur nursery in South Gate, California as a salesperson. Jean worked as a PBX operator at Saint John’s hospital in Santa Monica and taught social dancing at Arthur Murray Dance Studios. In spite of all this work, we had a great social life and attended parties weekly. Often, we would stay up all night partying and then go directly to work the next morning after going to a coffee shop for breakfast. I would take naps on the fertilizer stacks at La Fleur nursery.

My twin brother Bobby joined me at IBM. Our boss at IBM was a very charismatic and smooth senior executive named Joe Mount. Joe had a PhD in math from UCLA. Putting great importance on the choice of advisor—and rightly so—he directed me towards choosing his former advisor, Professor C.B. Tompkins, as my advisor. Tompkins had been an excellent mathematician in his day; however, he gave me no guidance on choosing, researching, or writing a thesis. I was left alone to choose a problem, do all the research, and write the thesis. Tompkins did not even know what my problem was about. However, Dave Sánchez, a member of my doctoral committee, entered into the later stages of the process and guided me in rewriting my thesis, “A Generalization of Newton’s Method with an Application to the Euler-Lagrange Equation.” At one point, I told Professor Tompkins that I was making little research progress on my thesis because I was working too many hours outside of the university. So, he went to Professor Magnus Hestenes, the director of the Office of Naval Research-sponsored UCLA Institute for Numerical Analysis and was able to obtain a research assistantship for me. I then quickly finished my thesis, a respectable contribution to the math literature.

Struggles with Identity

As I grew up, I was often told by ignorant people “Mexican, go back to where you came from.” When I visited Mexico at the age of 13, I was told “Gringo, go home.” So my confusion led me to ask where do I belong, what is my identity? I am not a white American and I am not Mexican. At UCLA, in the mid 1960s, I would discover that my proper identity was being Chicano. That has served me well for my entire life. Soy Chicano! So the roles that I identify with and make me happy are: Chicano, Tejano, mathematician, and car enthusiast.

Put those four identities into one and you get something that looks like this image taken from the cover of SACNAS News.

When I was at UCLA there were foreign Latino graduate students and faculty, but we did not really understand each other. They did not understand me as a Chicano growing up in the United States and the resultant extra baggage. Until I met Professor David Sánchez, a 1960’s Chicano, I believed that to be a successful math graduate student or math faculty member you had to be from another country. Sánchez was an appropriate and excellent role model for me. He knew well the path that I had traveled. We quickly bonded, and he served as the mentor and role model that I needed, but did not know that I needed. Foreign Latino faculty could not serve that function for me.

The Spanish language, which plays the dominant role in defining us Latinos, can also play a role in dividing us. When I first meet a foreign Latino, they invariably speak to me in Spanish. I can see that this clearly strengthens our newly formed relationship. However, my experience has been that this bond will sooner or later be challenged by my lack of proficiency with the Spanish language. Yes, I have been intimidated by native Spanish speakers all my life; hence, how can they serve as role models for me? I say this, not to air personal grievances, but to explain the complicated Latino identity issues that may impact mentoring among Latinos. As Latinos, we are not all the same and here is why it matters: If you hire a foreign Latino as faculty and think that he or she will be able a priori to mentor well your domestic Latino, that may not be the case at all.

Recently, one of our Chicano graduate students, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, decided to attend a meeting for Latin American graduate students at Rice. He is not fluent in Spanish, but at the meeting they all spoke Spanish and made fun of him, calling him a “fake Mexican.” He said he made a big mistake and will never attend those meetings again. I completely understood him and shared his discomfort. To be an active member of the Chicano movement in the late 1960s you did not need to speak perfect Spanish. Maybe I take pride that my identity is formed, in part, by my deficiency in Spanish. Being Chicano asserts my identity. Being Latino does not carry the same impact because it is far too broad and weak a distinction. I have been scarred over this issue of fluency in Spanish. This makes me react in a defensive manner as if I have a chip on my shoulder, which I probably do.

Now, it is perhaps interesting to compare this impact that the Spanish language has on me with the impact that the language of mathematics has on me. If I walk into a room full of world-class mathematicians, I do not experience that same feeling of deficiency even though many of them will be far more proficient in the language of mathematics. But here I can stay quiet until we reach my area of expertise, where I can run with the world’s best and may even lead the race.

Minority students are more likely to be inspired by those with whom they identify. Some believe that I am unnecessarily picky, but can’t they see the importance of this? The experiences of URM [6] students place them in contact with non-URMs all the time. Although it would be unrealistic to assert that only URM faculty can be of value as mentors and guides for URM students, it is important to cultivate the mentorship pool to include mentors made from the same fabric as the URM students.

The Professoriate and More

David Sánchez was the only domestic Latino mathematics faculty member at UCLA when I was a graduate student and he was on my doctoral committee. Upon graduation, he asked me what I was going to do. I replied that I did not know and would probably take an industrial job. He said that I should try academia. I had never thought of that, but told him that it sounded exciting, so I would consider it. Sánchez and Lowell J. Paige, the chairman of the UCLA Mathematics Department, called Barkley Rosser, the Director of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison and convinced him to offer me a postdoctoral position. When I received the offer, I told Jean, by now my wife of nine years, to pack up our belongings and our two children because we were going to Wisconsin.

Spending the next two years at The Mathematics Research Center (MRC) was the best decision I have ever made in terms of my professional career. I was no longer a student and had an opportunity to run with the big dogs: world-class mathematicians like Barkley Rosser, I.J. Schoenberg, and Michael Golomb. They treated me like a colleague; I was no longer a student and running with the best in the world. When I went on the job market after being at the MRC for two years, I had multiple excellent offers from Tier 1 Research Universities. Jean and I accepted a position at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I have to wonder how many of us URM mathematicians would rise to the top of our fields if we are given opportunities like I was given at the MRC.

I started at Rice in 1970 as an assistant professor. At Rice I just wanted to be a good professor in terms of research, teaching, and service to the department and the university. However, I soon saw that as an URM who had traveled that challenging road, I could be very effective in mentoring and working with both undergraduate and graduate URM Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) students. Moreover, there was a great need and there was no one who could step up to the plate. I immediately faced a critical decision that would challenge and plague me throughout my entire career. This is the delicate balance between professional activities, mainly research, that would be rewarded and outreach activity that would not be rewarded, but was so much needed. We young URM faculty had heard many alarming stories about minorities not being promoted for various reasons.

It became clear to me that I should get tenure before I start doing significant outreach, so I did. Nothing tests an individual’s survival skills better than figuring out the path to promotion with tenure and then following it. Too often, young faculty do not seem to possess or exercise the needed skills. I was really quite good at university survival. I received a promotion to associate professor with tenure in 1972, essentially in record time.

I always understood that you had to write many papers to secure tenure (they need not be great, but must be good enough to be published in good journals). You can write books and conduct high-risk, challenging, and truly important research after you gain tenure. As I reflect back, I probably advanced too early, but I made it, and it moved me even further towards the front of the bus. At times, I felt that I was driving the bus. Our chair suggested that I had such good visibility in the Rice community because I was an URM, and I had such good teaching evaluations because I had long hair. He may be right on the former point, but not on the latter point. I was now in a secure position to embrace giving back in terms of addressing underrepresentation. I can help because I have been there and I understand, and now I have tenure. The first thing that I did in terms of outreach was found the group Rice Association of Mexican-American Students (RAMAS) in 1972. In the photo below, you see our original group. We did have one woman in RAMAS, but she was absent for the picture. That was the gender balance in those days.

Molding of Leadership—Rice Days

The maids, the janitors, and the groundskeepers were almost exclusively Mexican at Rice. They were so proud to see one of their own at the faculty level and they showed it in their respect for me, the first Mexican-American faculty member. They could not speak English, so they were overjoyed that there was a faculty member with whom they could identify with, and that they could talk to in Spanish. In contrast to the foreign Latinos that I described earlier, my bond with these women was outstanding; they were my people. One day several maids came to my office saying that there was something important that they wanted to tell me—their boss, the director of buildings and grounds who was well-connected, was stealing from Rice. I asked these maids if they could have their immediate supervisor come and talk to me about this accusation. Mr. Cruz came and repeated the identical story. While I was trying to figure out what to do next, I was told by the maids that Mr. Cruz had been fired by the director of buildings and grounds. It seemed that he learned that Cruz had talked to me. At this time colleagues had shared with me that the German Department was trying to get rid of an excellent non-tenured young woman faculty member so that they could retain a not-so-excellent non-tenured male faculty member.

It was clear now that I must go to then Rice President Norman Hackerman with my two concerns. Hackerman was forceful, direct, and talking to him seemed like standing in front of an approaching Mack truck. Yet, he was a brilliant and well-recognized chemist and at the time he was the chair of the National Science Board. I decided to visit President Hackerman and relate my two concerns. My stories did not fall well with President Hackerman. He sternly told me that my stories could not be true and that I was an enemy of the university. I so clearly remember those words. I now realize this was a bold move, since I did not have tenure at the time, and furthermore, a few months before, I had a verbal confrontation with then Rice Provost Frank Vandiver at a general faculty meeting over some comments that he made in reference to minorities as faculty. About a week later, I was called back to the president’s office. He told me that the German Department issue had been taken care of, that Cruz would be reinstated with back pay, that the top boss had been fired, and that he was going to nominate me to the National Science Board. He did nominate me, but I was not elected because I was junior faculty, and members of the National Science Board are distinguished scientists and administrators. However, I was elected some 25 years later. I realized that this was Hackerman’s way of saying he respected my bold style.

Throughout my career I have been an active and visible leader at Rice. I was an active member of the undergraduate admission committee for six years. I was the chair of the Mathematical Sciences Department for five years, and I founded the President’s Lecture Series of Diverse Scholars. I directed the National Science Foundation sponsored Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professorate for more than ten years. I founded the Tapia Center for Excellence and Equity in Education. In addition, I was a good citizen, good teacher, and good researcher. I gave Rice excellent national visibility in many components.

Molding of Leadership—Beyond Rice

In 1968, the Chicano movement in Los Angeles and at UCLA was alive and strong. It was then and there that I found my identity. In 1972, New Mexico Medical School Professor Alonzo Atencio, with funding from the National Institutes of Health, called together a group of 17 young fresh science professionals to discuss the formation of an organization that eventually would be called Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS). We were brown with some shades of red, all male because that was the way that science representation was at that time. We desperately needed the support of each other, for only we, certainly not our university colleagues, growing up in this country, faced in our professional life. Chicano gave me an identity, and SACNAS gave me a family that supported that identity. Our first meeting, in 1973, consisted of 50 young professionals getting together in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Over the years our membership grew and at the 2019 SACNAS annual meeting more than 4,000, mostly brown undergraduate students, attended. The early SACNAS members became more than my professional family—they became my family.

As an applied mathematics professional, I also became actively involved early in my career in the applied mathematics organization Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). I attended its annual meetings, joined committees, gave talks, and served as conference organizer for several highly visible SIAM annual conferences and special conferences. My SACNAS and SIAM activities brought me nominations to prestigious committees, including the National Science Board, a Clinton presidential appointment. This visibility coupled with my research activity and well-recognized mentoring and direction of women and underrepresented minority students in turn led to prestigious awards, including selection to the National Academy of Engineering (first Latino ever) in 1992 and the National Medal of Science (only Latino ever) awarded by President Obama in 2011. This followed the creation of the David Blackwell–Richard Tapia Mathematics Conference in 2000 and the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in 2002. By now I had become a well-recognized national STEM leader with far more than my share of prestigious awards.

Advice to Students and Mentors

It is said that what does not break you strengthens you. I surmise that I am not completely broken, but the personal tragedies of my dancer wife Jean battling multiple sclerosis for more than forty years, our daughter Circee’s accidental death, and our son Richard’s bouts with personal issues have caused me to live increasingly close to this boundary of being broken. I would trade my numerous awards and honors, and my wife Jean would suffer through multiple sclerosis again, to avoid the tragedy of losing our daughter Circee to an automobile accident. But we do not have that choice. Our only choice is to give up or play the hand that we were dealt. The choice is easy. Life has its strange twists.

When you encounter obstacles and adversity, learn to look both ways. Your challenge is to handle adversity. Prosperity is quite easy to handle. Realize that tragedy and failure are as much a part of life as are triumph and success. Failure is a part of every successful person’s life. You must learn to grow from your failures and to develop compassion and sensitivity from your tragedies. At each stage of your life and career, continue to dream and work to make your dreams come true. However, learn to cope and still enjoy life if they do not all come true. [7]

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[1] Much of the material in this chapter had its origins in Dr. Tapia’s forthcoming book Losing the Precious Few: How America Fails to Educate Minorities in Science and Engineering, Arte Publico Press University of Houston.
[2] Simone Biles is an American artistic gymnast and is the most decorated American gymnast.
[3] Selena Quintanilla, regarded as the Queen of Tejano music, was a Mexican-American singer and songwriter.
[4] Bobby passed away in April 2020. Ana passed away in 2009.
[5] Okies refers to farm families displaced from Oklahoma and nearby states to California in the 1930s by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.
[6] Acronym for “underrepresented minority.”
[7] Part of this section is adapted from Dr. Tapia’s commencement address at Harvey Mudd College in May of 2017.

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Previous Testimonios:

• Dr. James A. M. Álvarez
• Dr. Federico Ardila Mantilla
• Dr. Selenne Bañuelos
• Dr. Erika Tatiana Camacho
• Dr. Anastasia Chavez
• Dr. Minerva Cordero
• Dr. Ricardo Cortez
• Dr. Jesús A. De Loera Herrera
• Dr. Jessica M. Deshler
• Dr. Carrie Diaz Eaton
• Dr. Alexander Díaz-López
• Dr. Stephan Ramon Garcia
• Dr. Ralph R. Gomez
• Dr. Victor H. Moll
• Dr. Ryan R. Mouruzzi, Jr.
• Dr. Cynthia Oropesa Anhalt
• Dr. Omayra Ortega
• Dr. José A. Perea
• Dr. Angel Ramón Pineda Fortín
• Dr. Hortensia Soto
• Dr. Roberto Soto