Iris Fujiura Bombelyn won the Career Achievement in Industry Award in 2013. At the time, she was vice president of Narrowband Communications and program manager of Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company's Mobile User Objective System satellite program.
As vice president, Bombelyn led a team of more than 300 employees delivering a satellite and ground system that allows better communications for warfighters in the field to make smartphone-like mobile connections with digital data and voice.
During her career, Bombelyn guided thousands of employees through change, built high-performing teams, and executed multi-million-dollar programs for spacecraft and launch vehicles. She also mentored college students.
“I was the first one in my family to graduate from college,” she told Women of Color magazine. “Dad was a longshoreman and mom was a seamstress. Dad met mom in Japan, after World War II as a Japanese-American U.S. interpreter. When I went off to college, my dad asked me what major I was going to declare. I told him I was thinking about journalism because I liked writing or engineering because I was good at math. He looked at me for a beat, and with an absolute deadpan delivery, said ‘Well, kid, engineers eat.’ Dad was right. Engineers not only eat, but they also get to solve problems, invent, and generally make everything around them better.”
Bombelyn earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Washington State University and an M.B.A. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She started her career as an instrumentation engineer working at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on the Titan rocket launch team.
Through her Sloan Fellowship Class of 2009 and Boston Women in Business Groups, she helped raise funds for Boston Aids Africa and World Vision. She is a member of IEEE and MentorNet, a program that connects students with scientists and engineers, and the Council of Asian American Leaders leadership forum.
Currently, Bombelyn chairs the Advisory Board of The Harold Frank Engineering Entrepreneurship Institute at her alma mater Washington State University and is a managing director with Golden Seeds, an Angel Investment group.