Luz Rivas
Founder and Executive Director
DIY Girls
Luz Rivas founded DIY Girls in 2011. Like girls in our program, Luz is a daughter of Mexican immigrants and grew up in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles. After learning to program in 5th grade, Luz decided to pursue a technical career. Her persistence led to an acceptance to MIT. She credits her success to the early exposure to technology. Luz started her career at Motorola where she was an Electrical Design Engineer working on position and navigation systems for the automotive industry. For the last 10 years, she has worked in out-of school STEM education. In 2005, she co-authored a report published by NASA that focused on increasing STEM activities in afterschool environments. She has developed programs focused on increasing underrepresented minorities in STEM fields at Caltech and most recently was a director at Iridescent where she worked on training programs for engineers interested in teaching kids. For 2 years, she taught an undergraduate course developed by Iridescent at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. She has presented at conferences such as American Society of Engineering Education and Engineers without Borders. Luz is a 2011 graduate of the Southern California Leadership Network Leadership LA program and serves on the board of the MIT Club of Southern California. Luz has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Masters in Technology in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.