Lina M. Echeverria is the 2006 Women of Color Technologist of the Year.
At Corning Incorporated, she retired as vice president and director of exploratory markets and technologies in 2009. Prior, she worked at the Corning European Technology Center in France as division vice president and director. Other positions she held during her 21-year career at Corning include research director, Inorganic Technologies, and various positions in research and development as well as technology management.
Echeverria attended the Max Planck Institut fur Chemie (Research Scientist), Carnegie Institution of Washington (Postdoc Fellow, Isotope Geochemistry), Stanford University (Ph.D. Geology), and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the oldest engineering school in Colombia.
She has worked as an innovation leadership consultant, was a principal at Seven Passions of Innovation, LLC, and also worked with the American Management Association.
Nominate an outstanding researcher you know for a 2021 Women of Color STEM Award. Click Apply Now to begin your nomination application.
Below is Lina Echeverria's biography on her author's page on Amazon:
Lina Echeverría spent twenty-five years inspiring creativity and accelerating innovation at Corning Incorporated, one of America's leading technology companies. Echeverría led teams of scientists and researchers at Corning that developed everything from the ceramic filters for car exhausts, glasses for TV screens, dental bridges, and dinnerware. She was part of a culture that has provided the world with everything from the optical fiber that is the backbone of the Internet to the glass used as the tough but beautiful touchscreen for iPhones.
At Corning, Echeverría created an environment where scientists were both creative and productive, where teams balanced the ability to explore the edges of possibility, while also delivering critical new technology on time and on budget. Echeverría was known not just for her ability to effectively lead and manage (and keep happy) creative scientists, she was known for her ability to teach those skills to other managers. During her career, she managed teams and led organizations both in Corning, New York, and in Fontainebleau, France.
Echeverría began challenging convention early, as a student in her native Colombia. She was the first woman to seek admission and to graduate with a degree in engineering geology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia at Medellín, opening the door to a new field for a generation of women in a school with a tradition as the most rigorous in the country in engineering. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in geology at Stanford.
After winning a fight against aggressive breast cancer, Echeverría stepped aside from the corporate world to focus on her passions: helping create cultures of innovation inside companies and organizations and creating wearable textile art in her studio. The mother of two, she is fluent in English, Spanish, and French, and has lived in four different countries. She lives in upstate New York with her husband, also a research scientist, and their two greyhounds.
