Engineering a Safer, More User-Friendly Future

JUAN M. “JOHN” GARCIA ’99 has been tinkering with machinery and electronics since grade school. A precocious kid with an insatiable curiosity about how things work, he’s been building his own computers since the age of 12.

Since earning his electrical engineering degree from the University of Iowa in 2003, he has been at the forefront of a technological revolution that is changing the way we live and work.

From 2016 to 2019, he served as an engineer and product manager for HARMAN, where he researched autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle product strategies, including GPS navigation systems that will employ machine learning and other artificial intelligence technologies to enhance the user experience.

According to Garcia, we can look forward to navigation systems that will suggest the location of a favorite restaurant at lunchtime or alert us to the location of gas or charging stations when our fuel tanks or batteries are running low.

Now at Motorola Solutions, Garcia is creating aerial intelligence solutions for public safety agencies worldwide. 4 J John Garcia ‘99 from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and a BA in Spanish from Johns Hopkins University.