FY18 Candidate Bios: Vice President of Outreach

The FY18 nominating committee is very excited to present the following candidate bios for the elected positions listed below:

• Vice President of Career Guidance/Outreach (elect 1):
• Dana Day
• Lynette Lopez
• Sarah McDowell

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Dana Day

Dana is a long-time advocate for STEM outreach for girls. Having served as the FY12 SWE-PNW President, she is familiar with the potential strength and passion this section has to give back to our communities by sharing our love stories about engineering. As FY11 President-Elect, she sought out a task force to bring back PNW's partnership with the local girl scout groups. Dana looks forward to growing that partnership as the FY18 VP of Career Guidance.

Dana has been a SWE member since 2004, a SWE Distinguished New Engineer award recipient in 2015, and has held a several positions throughout SWE. Most notably, she was the FY15 Society Outreach Chair. Dana worked with the SWE Outreach director and her team to launch the Outreach Metric Tool and the popular SWENext program during her term. She also focused on building better connections and relationships with the sections and outreach advocates across the Society. For 5 years, she was on the core planning team for the Invent It. Build It. event that is held on the last day of the annual conference. She has continued to be a key figure in executing large-scale STEM Outreach events, including at the 2016 Joint Regions' ABJ Conference and the SWENext DesignLab event at WE Local San Jose.

Dana wants to continue to build on the SWE-PNW outreach foundation by building stronger partnerships with local STEM organizations, expanding our outreach portfolio, and enabling our members with the right training to become confident and effective outreach leaders.

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Lynette Lopez

Lynette Lopez is a manufacturing engineer at Boeing working on production of the 777 fuselage. She has Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Northern Arizona University, and is currently working on an MBA from Pepperdine University. 

She began her SWE membership as the president of her university’s SWE chapter in 2005. For the past 3 years, she has led the Expanding Your Horizons events for SWE PNW, an event which focuses on introducing middle and high school girls to careers in STEM.

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Sarah McDowell

Sarah McDowell has been a member of SWE since 2013 as a mechanical engineering student at Washington University in St. Louis.  As a collegiate member, she planned and organized the Girl Scout Day event, which included various engineering-based activities for the girls ages 8-14.

She has always been passionate about encouraging young girls to learn more about STEM fields and gain the confidence and interest to pursue them throughout their education.  She also volunteered for Girls for Science, a Chicago-based organization that supplements the public schools' science curriculum by teaching middle school girls about various STEM subjects on intensive Saturday learning sessions.  Sarah has continued being an active SWE member since graduation and joined the PNW Chapter when she moved to Seattle in October 2016.