The Southern Arizona Professional Chapter was founded in 1985 with Ms. Shirley Cox as the first Chapter President. In August 2005, the chapter reorganized to better serve SHPE members and the Hispanic community in southern Arizona. Since then, the chapter has been able to maintain a good level of activity to help achieve SHPE’s mission. We have focused on providing strong professional development programs, social mixers to encourage members to build their network of contacts, organizing community outreach programs, and partnering with local corporate sponsors such as Raytheon, IBM, Texas Instruments, and the University of Arizona.
The Chapter received two awards at the SHPE Conference 2010: Region 2 Professional Chapter of the Year and the National Small Professional Chapter of the Year.
The Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) was founded in Los Angeles, California, in 1974 by a group of engineers employed by the City of Los Angeles. Their objective was to form a national organization of professional engineers to serve as role models in the Hispanic community.
The concept of networking was the essential basis for the organization. SHPE quickly established two student chapters to begin the network that would grow to encompass the nation as well as reach countries outside the United States. Today, SHPE enjoys a strong but independent network of professional and student chapters throughout the nation. By expanding at an aggressive pace and currently includes 170 student chapters with more than 5300 student members and 42 professional chapters with over 1500 professional members.
SHPE is the leading social-technical organization whose primary function is to enhance and achieve the potential of Hispanics in engineering, math and science. For detailed information about SHPE as a national organization visit www.shpe.org.