Georgia Tech industrial engineers are used to breaking boundaries and achieving "firsts." So it is not surprising that one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in ISyE at Georgia Tech has continued her pioneering ways. Zulma Toro-Ramos, Ph.D. 1988, was the first female chancellor at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez (UPRM), and she is now the dean of engineering at the University of New Haven (UNH) in West Haven, Connecticut.

Toro-Ramos was featured in the July 2002 issue of IIE Solutions, where she described the challenges she faced moving her career forward. The first challenge was just getting in the faculty door at UPRM, the territory's only land grant academic institution. Again, she was one of the first females ever hired in the engineering department. It took a lot of hard work, but she moved steadily through the ranks to become industrial engineering department chair and acting dean of the department before being selected as chancellor.

At UNH, where she oversees six engineering programs, Toro-Ramos is working to raise the level of the academic programs by focusing on multidisciplinary engineering education. She told IIE Solutions that one of the main reasons students leave engineering programs is because they are not exposed to their core curriculum and other engineering disciplines until the end of their second year. "Nowadays, engineers need to know how to work with other engineering fields — not only other engineering fields, but with other professionals as well...That will require a revision of the whole curriculum, implementation of new labs, and the training of some of our teachers, and we are in the process of doing that already," she said.

Toro-Ramos told the magazine that she considers her experience at Georgia Tech to be the most important in her life. "The quality of the Ph.D. program there, the rigors through which you have to go, prepare you for anything in life, on the one hand. On the second hand, having had the opportunity to work with very well known people in the field helps you a lot." Toro-Ramos' dissertation advisors were Dr. John White, now chancellor of the University of Arkansas (who left Tech during those years but remained on her dissertation committee); and Dr. Leon McGinnis, now Eugene C. Gwaltney Chair.

Toro-Ramos is committed to UNH for at least five years, but her career is far from over. There are many more "firsts" to come before she retires.

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