By Summerlyn Murray
A social worker, firefighter and GIS mapper walk into a room…
This sounds like a setup for a bad joke, but you could find any of these characters in a staff meeting at the Cockrell School of Engineering.
As one of the top engineering programs in the country, Cockrell is home to an impressive group of individuals, and that goes beyond our students and faculty. The staff at the Cockrell School is made up of close to 700 multifaceted humans who are, well, not engineers. But, these folks bring varying backgrounds and unique perspectives that are integral to innovation across the Forty Acres.
These staffers are natural-born problem-solvers with a passion for collaboration and efficiency, and simply put, just good people. And we’re excited to give just a few of these folks their flowers.
Kiersten Fernandez
My job is… senior outreach program coordinator
At the Cockrell School, learning begins well before students step on to the Forty Acres. Cockrell’s eight K-12 outreach programs aim to stoke interest in the engineering field from a young age.
Senior Outreach Program Coordinator Kiersten Fernandez leads this mission and develops the school’s youth outreach initiatives. When we spoke to Fernandez over the summer, the evidence of camp fun littered her temporary office, a storage closet filled floor to ceiling with educational supplies—everything from clay to circuit kits.
The daughter of an educator, Fernandez recalls her early exposure to the occupation in her mother’s classroom.
“From the time I was a young child even through high school, I would visit her, and she’d invite me up to teach her students. Education was always a part of my life.”
When the Austin native left the Lone Star State to attend Benedictine College in Kansas, she took a detour into advertising before returning to the road she was meant to take all along.
After completing her degree, she returned to Austin to begin her career as a fifth-grade teacher at St. Louis Catholic School. A couple years later, she transitioned into public education at Kealing Middle School, where she spent the next 13 years teaching language arts and history.
Five years into her journey in education, a tragedy struck that would alter the trajectory of her career. Fernandez unexpectedly lost one of her students in a car accident.
She takes a deep breath as she recounts the experience. “It made me realize I didn’t want to just teach. I realized teaching is all about the relationships, not just the curriculum or the grading. That’s when I decided to go back for my master’s in social work.”
After earning a degree in social work from Texas State University in 2014, she returned to Kealing to merge her backgrounds in education and social work. She led a program called AVID that helps first-generation students prepare for college. Years later, after navigating the uncharted waters of teaching through a pandemic, she found her way to The University of Texas at Austin in 2022.
In her current role, Fernandez leads the Cockrell School’s K-12 outreach programs, including the Longhorn Engineering Summer Camps. These camps cater to outstanding rising eighth and ninth graders who express early interest in engineering but have limited exposure to the field due to academic or socioeconomic hardships.
When asked about the highlights of her job, Fernandez beamed at the opportunity to rave about her student helpers.
“I couldn’t do these camps without them. The truly defining moment for me every summer is watching them grow as teachers, as friends, as engineers. They amaze me.”
— Kiersten Fernandez, senior outreach program coordinator, Cockrell School of Engineering
Kiersten Fernandez with Texas Engineering students who help run K-12 camps.
Fernandez draws heavily from her social work experience to build program curriculum. “We do a lot of social and emotional learning within our camps,” Fernandez said. “We build a curriculum rooted in team building and collaboration, which I find extremely important, as you rarely find an engineer working alone.”
Fernandez also runs school field trips and several major Cockrell events throughout the year, including World of Engineering, Future Engineers Day and the Edison Lecture Series. A faithful adopter of the mantra “never stop learning,” she also coordinates with various university offices to develop and promote professional development opportunities for UT faculty, staff and students.
The licensed social worker and former English teacher’s infectious laugh and charismatic passion for her job echoed throughout our conversation.
“This is my dream job. It allows me to blend my worlds together every day. Teaching and leading these kiddos is a true joy, but really, I should say they’re the ones teaching me.”
Campers get to work on projects, learn from world-class faculty and more.
Off the Clock
When she’s not empowering the courageous engineers of tomorrow, the animal lover and mother to several furry friends herself can be found volunteering at Austin Pets Alive’s neonatal clinic to bottle feed kittens, traveling the world and listening to live music around Austin.
Guillermo Nieves III
My job is… MER facility manager
Behind the research and hands-on learning that takes place in facilities across the Forty Acres, there’s a special group of folks who help make it happen. Guillermo Nieves is one of them.
Known for his contagious positivity and bright smile, the military veteran and facility manager for the Microelectronics and Engineering Research Building makes an impact on every individual he meets. And he meets a lot of people. Nieves works directly with students and faculty to ensure labs are set up properly, new equipment functions well and the building remains safe.
And that’s just a fraction of what he does.
“I guess the question is what don’t we do? For facility managers, your scope of work is really anything that your department needs,” said Nieves.
“Whether it be unloading freight packages or setting up labs or even just providing a morale boost for your coworkers. It’s really doing whatever it takes to get the job done. And as a facility manager, we do everything to make sure that that happens.”
— Guillermo Nieves, MER facility manager
Although not an engineer himself, Nieves shares the pension for innovation and problem-solving. In his previous role with the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, he worked with the department’s inventory manager to create a database to track inventory coming in and out of the building, a much-needed system, especially when dealing with state-of-the-art equipment worth millions of dollars.
After leaving the military, Nieves initially found his way into the glamorous world of plumbing. As a plumber, he learned the tricks of the trade under Michael Foley, a current Zone II supervisor at UT. Nieves followed Foley and began his journey at UT in 2020, working in Zone I facility services. After a few years, he applied for his first building manager position at Cockrell.
Before joining the team at MER, Nieves was focused on a passion project for ASE: a 3D printing lab for students. The ingenuity and creative freedom of Texas Inventionworks inspired him.
“Building this lab for the students to use and seeing their eyes light up at all the cool technologies that we’re bringing in for them is very fulfilling to see. It’s a lot of hard work being the ones building it, but seeing the students’ excitement about the space makes it all worth it.”
Just a month into his new gig at Cockrell, Nieves has already made an impact, organizing and revitalizing the building amid ongoing construction to help establish MER as a leading force in semiconductor research.
Off the Clock
Nieves’ passion for helping others extends beyond the walls of the facilities he manages. Since 2018, Nieves has been a registered firefighter with Bastrop County Emergency Services District No. 1 (formerly Elgin Fire Department). Just this summer, he assisted with recovery operations in Kerrville, Texas, following the devastating floods that impacted the area in July.
Nieves brings his heart for others to work every day, offering tours of the facilities to anyone who expresses interest. “I’ve never turned anyone away,” Nieves shared.
While he may be managing a new building, be sure to check out ASE’s 3D printing lab. Rumor has it, he’s still working on his Iron Man suit!
Matt Whitaker
My job is… EER assistant building manager
“The way that I describe my job really poorly is I help scientists plug stuff into the building,” Matt Whitaker humbly jokes when talking about what he does at UT.
Don’t let the humility fool you. As the assistant building manager of the Cockrell School’s 430,000-square foot Engineering Education and Research Center (EER), Whitaker’s impact extends far beyond successfully plugging things in.
Stroll through the EER on any given day and you might see a robot dog plodding through the atrium, some of the brightest minds on the planet having a spirited debate about AI or a line out the door at O’s for enchiladas.
You’re also bound to cross paths with Whitaker doing routine laps around the premises. We joined Whitaker for one of these laps as we chatted about what it means to help manage Cockrell’s flagship building.
In his role, he serves as the liaison between building management and Texas Engineers. From setting up labs for research success to enforcing building safety practices, Whitaker does it all to make sure that engineers utilize the building’s features to their fullest potential in the safest means possible.
“My job is to get machines working and help researchers get the bugs worked out. I also get to learn about the research they’re working on and follow up on how it’s going. I love that part of my job. Being able to assist them with and learn about something they’ve worked their whole life towards, it’s incredibly meaningful.”
— Matt Whitaker, EER assistant building manager
Whitaker was no stranger to working with STEM-minded individuals before joining Cockrell in 2018. Originally from Idaho, he got his start working on machinery in a potato warehouse, where he discovered his natural gift for building and fixing equipment.
The experience led Whitaker to pursue trade school and an internship at a pharmaceutical laboratory in Salt Lake City. There, he developed an affinity for working with scientists, an environment he would later come back to.
“The company that my father-in-law worked for did environmental consulting,” Whitaker said. “They were opening a new office in Los Alamos, N.M., to work on cleaning up Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project site, and they needed somebody who could use a computer and also run a piece of equipment. Since I fit the qualifications, they insisted I go work there, so I did.”
For more than six years, Whitaker worked on the high-hazard historical site in Los Alamos, taking on a variety of roles and responsibilities from site safety to GIS mapping, all learned through intense on-the-job training.
“That job really taught me how to operate in situations where things didn’t always go 100% to plan.”
Since coming to UT, Whitaker has built a strong community among his colleagues. He currently manages four work study students and collaborates with other UT building managers to share best practices and resources.
Throughout our stroll with Whitaker, multiple hellos and even a “You’re the man!” echoed across the halls. Cockrell celebrity status achieved.
No two days are the same when you manage a multipurpose building that welcomes thousands of folks every year to conduct innovative research, attend high-profile events and score the ultimate study spot.
A building management all-star team, from left to right: Bobby Woodbury, Gary L. Thomas Energy Engineering Building manager; Jason Pannell, Engineering Education and Research Center (EER) staff technical assistant IV; Matt Whitaker, EER assistant building manager; Shawn Tran, student employee; Bryan Hook, EER staff technical assistant IV.
“If you want to work on scanning electron microscopes, we can help with that. If you want to host a party for a few hundred people, we can do that too,” Whitaker says from our spot in the EER atrium, surrounded by a sea of students fervently studying and collaborating with peers.
Whitaker’s impact on the individuals he works with has not gone unnoticed. Genuine gratitude spilled out of his almost tear-filled eyes as he highlighted a recent full-circle moment with a student.
“I recently went to a student’s Ph.D. defense. At the end, they extended a thank you to EER building management and even called out our names. That was really touching.”
Off the Clock
Promoting safety is a core facet of Whitaker’s day job, but the building manager is quite the adventure seeker outside of the EER. When he’s not telling researchers to put on their PPE, he can be found scaling rock walls across the country.
WANT TO SHOUT OUT A Cockrell staff member?
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