Promise for the future

‘A serendipitous life’

THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN THE RIGHT PLACES

WERE KEY TO LYDIA TAPIA’S SUCCESS

Growing up, Lydia Tapia was curious about computers, but didn’t have much interest in what would eventually become her area of expertise: computer science.

An Albuquerque native, the now-professor and incoming chair of the Department of Computer Science was actually more interested in biology. One of her first exposures to computer science was when she was a student at Sandia High School and became involved in the New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge.

“My friends and I signed up because we were strong math students and we got a trip to Glorietta [New Mexico],” she said. “I didn’t even know how to code!”

When she was a senior in high school, she was an intern at Sandia National Laboratories through the Career Enrichment Program. Although she found some of the projects interesting, she wasn’t convinced that a career in computer science was right for her.

Even though she wasn’t set on a career in computer science, she began to make some lifelong connections while at Sandia that would guide her along her path in years to come: Nadine Miner (a UNM Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award recipient), Sharon Stansfield and Jim Pinkerton.

After high school, she began as a student at Tulane University, but not in computer science. “I wanted to do biomedical engineering.”

After graduation, Tapia returned to Albuquerque to work at Sandia. She wasn’t sure what her future held. “I didn’t think about what came afterward.” Then her mentors encouraged her to pursue graduate school, so she soon enrolled at Texas A&M, with an area of study in computer science with a focus on molecular modeling.

There, she was immersed in her classes and research, pulling the typical late-nighters of a graduate student. She began experiencing some health symptoms, so she visited the student health clinic. She was told it was probably a sinus infection.

But later, she began to experience seizures and her husband, William, rushed her to the ER. Turns out, she suffered two strokes (later attributed to a bloodclotting disorder), temporarily losing her vision, the ability to walk and a lot of her motor skills. At age 24, she was hospitalized for three months at a top stroke hospital in Houston. She had to relearn tasks like walking and grasping a pencil, but amazingly, her verbal and computational abilities were unscathed. Today, she still suffers some slight motor deficits, but she fared considerably better than what doctors at the time thought: “One doctor told me I should quit graduate school and go into telemarketing since I could speak so well.”

The experience changed her. She had to delay her Ph.D. progress for about a year, then return to her studies gradually. She said the experience gave her a greater understanding of people with challenges, which has helped her better understand the struggles that students face. “It made me a lot more empathic, and it also taught me to recognize my limits.”

Tapia earned her Ph.D. in 2009, then took a Computing Innovation postdoctoral fellow position at the University of Texas at Austin. She had to cut that fellowship short when she was offered an assistant professor position at UNM in 2011.

In the last decade, she quickly rose through the ranks, being promoted to full professor the same year she was selected as department chair, the second female to lead the department at UNM. She has a thriving research enterprise, focusing on artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational biology and robotic motion planning. Among her many awards, in 2016, she received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Now, as department chair, on top of research and teaching, she is balancing budgets, staff and managing overflowing classrooms, thanks to the popularity of computer science. Still, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“This is the best job in the world,” she said.

She agreed to a two-year term as department chair and has wasted no time in getting to work.

In particular, she would like to improve the academic advising experience, as well as the tutoring and mentoring, all with the goal of improving retention. She is excited about a new Section Leader Program, championed and funded by computer science alumna Polle Zellweger and her husband Jock Mackinlay, which develops leadership skills by tasking senior-level students with teaching material to newer students. The program, started at Stanford, has been proven to benefit both leader and pupil.

She and her husband, William, have a daughter, Iliana, 13.

Tapia credits a lot of her success to mentors she found along the way, which she didn’t even seek out, as well as a lot of opportunities that spun off from her hard work. Now, she said, all those forces are coming together to give her the momentum she needs to succeed as a leader.

“I’ve had a serendipitous life to bring me to where I am today.”

“THIS IS THE BEST JOB IN THE WORLD” — LYDIA TAPIA

Read more at engineering.unm.edu