Diana Trujillo

Diana Trujillo grew up in Cali, Colombia, and moved to Florida at seventeen with barely two hundred dollars and almost no English, staying with an aunt and taking whatever work she could find, including cleaning houses, while attending community college classes at night. She has said she chose to study engineering partly because the coursework relied more on mathematics than on English fluency, which she was still building.

She transferred to the University of Florida and went on to a master's degree, then joined NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on the Curiosity Mars rover mission and later on the robotic arm and instrument systems for its successor, Perseverance. In 2020 she became one of the mission's flight directors, responsible for a team guiding the rover's operations, and led the English-and-Spanish bilingual broadcast of Perseverance's landing on Mars in February 2021, the first NASA broadcast of its kind conducted partly in Spanish, watched widely across Latin America.

She has continued to work on Mars sample-return planning at JPL while speaking frequently to Latino students about engineering careers, describing her own path less as a straight line than as a series of jobs taken to survive that happened to build, piece by piece, toward the qualifications NASA required. Her story is often cited within JPL as evidence of how much talent is lost when engineering pipelines assume a conventional, uninterrupted route in.