NASA superstar takes reins as the first woman UNT chancellor

[Harry]

Lesa Benton Roe’s mother discouraged her from going to college.

No one in the Benton family — not even Lesa’s older brother and sister — had made it past high school. And her mother, a switchboard operator in Gainesville, Fla., feared that her youngest couldn’t cut it, even though Lesa was a straight-A student.

“She was trying to brace me for failure,” Roe says. “But I had an internal drive to be something more.”

Fortunately, Roe listened to her father, a groundskeeper for the Veterans Administration who had always regretted not having a college degree and expected her get one.

She got two — an undergraduate degree and a master’s of science in electrical engineering.

She didn’t really know what engineers did until she got a co-op job at NASA while studying at the University of Florida.

During Roe’s 33-year meteoric career at NASA, she broke gender barriers and reshaped the way things got done at the $19.6 billion agency — making operations run smoother and more efficiently. She rose to second in command as acting deputy administrator when she retired in October and headed to Dallas.

Read more:  https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2018/04/27/lesa-benton-roe-nasa-superstar-first-woman-unt-chancellor

[EagleMBA]

Very impressive and positive article!