RELEASE
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08-149
NASA Marshall Center's Jose Roman Encourages Hispanic Community to Focus on Education
HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – In 1969, Jose Roman took a family vacation to Florida, visiting NASA's Kennedy Space Center. That day, he says, he fell in love with NASA and decided to pursue the education needed to become an engineer.
Through perseverance, Roman -- a native of Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico -- is living that dream. As a team member of Ares Projects at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Roman is helping design and develop the next generation of rockets. He believes a new era of discovery will spark the same passion in young people that he had, leading them to pursue careers with NASA.
Growing up, Roman always enjoyed math and excelled in his studies -- even taking college courses in his senior year of high school. After graduating from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, Roman was recruited by NASA in 1985 for an aerospace engineering position at the Marshall Center.
"The biggest challenge for me when I joined Marshall was the language barrier," Roman recalled. "English was a second language for me -- Spanish the first. Luckily, my supervisors at Marshall were very understanding and supportive while I adapted to a new culture."
He has contributed to several NASA projects throughout his career, including analyses for thermal conditions on the Hubble Space Telescope, orbiting Earth providing a clearer view of the universe than ground-based telescopes, and the creation of thermal modeling methods that saved time and increased the accuracy of analysis on the space shuttle main engines. Roman also continued his education, earning a master's degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 1990.
Today, he serves as a program and technical integration expert to the upper stage management team in the design and development of the Ares I upper stage, a component of the Ares I rocket and part of the Constellation Program to take human explorers to the moon, and then onward to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.
Roman encourages Hispanic students to do what he did: study science, technology, engineering or math -- fields of study crucial to NASA's future missions.
"The Hispanic youth today need to recognize how important education is," Roman said. "There are so many opportunities out there, and better education will ultimately lead to a better life."
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