On Monday October 10th the IAC engineer Mary Barreto was awarded, in Madrid, the "Women with Talent" award in the category of "Innovation and Enterprise" as a "person with consolidated talent". These prizes, promoted by the "Activia" brand, recognize the talent of six professional women who stand out in very different fields, divided in this first edition into "Art and creation", and "Gastronomy" as well as in the aforementioned "Innovation and Enterprise". More information about the prizes and the other winners at: http://mujerescontalento.activia.es/es/
After receiving the prize, Mary Barreto thanked "Activia" and especially the IAC for having given her the possibility of enjoying her work for 30 years. In her address she pointed out that normally women do not have an easy time, but stressed the importance of telling them that they can develop their abilities "if they do so with passion and self-confidence".
Management of projects with instrumentation
Mary Barreto was born in La Palma and spent her childhood in the handicraft workshop and the old mill built by her ancestors on a small farm on the island. Little by little the spirit of hard work within her family and the love of a job well done made their impression, and as a result she studied industrial engineering at the University of Zaragoza. Afterwards she returned to La Palma, where for 9 years she was the manager of one of the astrophysical observatories of the IAC: the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the municipality of Garafía. "There I experienced a wide variety of situations which gave me the chance to gain professional experience but above all personal experience" she says. After that she moved to IAC Headquarters in La Laguna, Tenerife, where she is now a manager of instrumentation projects. These have included the construction of the EMIR spectrograph, recently installed on the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC), and of LIRIS, which since 2003 has been used to observe continually on the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes (ING), both at the observatory of which she had been the manager.
Even though this prize recognizes her individual professional and personal path, she assures us that she would not have obtained anything at all without the people who made up the teams of the projects she has been happy to manage. "For me it is very important that everyone gives the best of themselves as professionals, that their own personalities shine through, and that they work happily, and enjoy working to overcome the strong challenges which we set ourselves. This is the only way I can conceive of my work" she concluded.
Before the prizewinning ceremony "Activia" carried out a study called "Women in Sync". The study did reveal the self-imposed barriers which hamper their development, 80% of those questioned considered that their talents did not receive adequate recognition. There are external barriers, such the so-called "glass ceiling", discrimination for maternity, the difficulty of working and having a family, the male concept of success, and the organization of institutions and companies. The idea of these prizes is to give an impulse to the full development of the capabilities of our professional women.
