Our guest speaker at the Friday evening banquet is Laurie Carrillo, an engineer at the Johnson Space Center. You can read a lot more about her on her Latina Women of NASA webpage.

Ms. Carrillo is active in encouraging a more diverse population in physics and engineering, a perfect fit with the "Future Faces of Physics" theme. Part of her talk will describe her personal experiences as a first-generation engineering college student and the challenges she faced as a Latina engineer.

She is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering at Rice University, while also working for NASA. Her research is related to the VASIMR project, which is working on a very high temperature plasma drive that could be used to greatly shorten the travel time to Mars. Pretty cool stuff! Be sure to make it to the banquet to learn more about VASIMR!