Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate Assistant Environmental Engineering University of New Mexico Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Carmen Velasco completed her undergraduate work at Universidad San Fran-cisco de Quito in her home country, Ecuador, before completing a master’s degree at Oregon State. After graduation she worked for two years as a process engineer at Pace International in the State of Washington before moving back home to lead the science team at Bustamante y Bustamante, an intellectual property law firm, and teach as a visiting professor at her alma mater.
In 2010, the Spain government offered Velasco a full scholarship to earn a second master’s degree in environmental management, after which she returned again to Ecuador to join the National Department of Environmental Health. Because of her commitment to facilitating the relationships among industry and government representatives to reduce pollution and improvement relating to environmental impacts on human health, she was soon promoted to director.
As director, she lead the development of national public policy in environmental health, coordinated activities of the department relating to environmental impacts on human health, and oversaw regulation enforcement. Even though her background was in chemical engineering rather than environmental health, she was able to apply the skills she learned as an engineer to an entirely different field.
“I think I did it and did it well because of my engineering background,” she said. “We are trained to solve problems.”In April 2015, Velas-co joined the Chemical Engineering Department at Universidad Central del Ecuador as a full-time professor, but recently returned to the United States to work toward a Ph.D. in environmental engineering at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Degrees
- M.S. Chemical Engineering, 2008