The Basics
How many years have you been with your current company? 3 years
First job? Philips Laboratories
Where were you born?El Salvador
Where did you grow up?El Salvador/NYC
Corporate Perspective
What is your corporation doing to ease the pain for universities during online learning?
Academic Cloud provides FPGA curricula, labs, access to advanced boards. Access if free. We actively reach out to universities in need. We have also invested to develop a new remote learning framework for education which allows remote access to FPGA hardware for labs using our tools and hardware. We are supporting many Universities helping them setup and role out this framework again for free for their students.
What are your future plans to assist in virtual learning, knowing it will be around for the foreseeable future?
Continue to improve real-time and live access to cloud services. Increase our virtual training classes, seminars. We are also continuing to fund many University Grants to partner with them in development of labs that can be used on our FPGA cloud facilitating remote learning.
What has been your personal or your company’s biggest challenge, or most significant achievement since the pandemic?
Communication and engagement with colleagues and balancing work/home boundaries in time and space
What do you want the academic community to know or understand about your company?
Intel is committed to our community, including the academic community and wants to be the best example of corporate responsibility and dedication to creating a better world by being good stewards of the environment and enabling technologies that lead toward solving the world’s toughest problems.
Now that you are working more closely with the academic community, what have you learned that you did not know previously?
There problems are similar, but the solutions are sometimes different because of the nature of funding and incentives for academic institutions.
If you had to choose another profession, what would you choose?
Teacher 😊
Was there a defining moment in your life that made you choose ECE as a profession?
Yes. When I was seven years old, I saw a science fiction movie that depicted a scientist/engineer that built a tele transporting device and whose passion for proving his technology led him to an accident that changed his life forever. I wanted to be that person and build a better machine that could be better tested.
Beyond the Desk
What would you tell your 18 year-old self?
When I came to the US, I had to fight not just to survive but to succeed. My parents had sent me to the US to save me from the horrors of a civil war and my responsibility was to take them out of there as soon as possible. My resources were few and I had to make the most of every penny I had; but in the end my advice would be: Be more generous. Giving is receiving.
Who/what inspires you?
People who are compassionate inspire me. In my view, true compassion is one of the hardest human virtues to achieve.
Philosophy of life in a nutshell?
Be curious about everything.
It’s never as bad as it seems. We have the power to change our lives at will. Any wage you would ask of life, life would willingly pay.
Nobody is better than me when it comes to…
Nothing: I’m a regular guy. I have no special superpowers. I am just curious about everything. For me, everything is an experiment.
If there is one thing I learned in life, it’s…
Never take yourself too seriously, especially when answering questionnaires like this.
A problem I have yet to solve…
How to make a real difference in the world
I always wanted to travel to…
Mars
You couldn’t pay me enough to…
Follow orders against my principles which I do not agree with.
In my opinion, the greatest invention of all time is…
Time
A good second one is writing.
One thing people don’t realize about me is…
I am a very shy person
Favorite movie? Why?
The Fly with Vincent Price. It made me want to be an engineer.