NEWS SITE DESCRIBES ILYA MAROTTA AS “ENGINEERING TITAN”

May 03, 20181 minute read

A recent article on OZY.com titled “This Engineering Titan is Building Panama’s Future” features Ilya Espino de Marotta, one of the 2018 AWESOME Legendary Leadership (ALL) Award honorees. Ilya, Executive Vice President for Engineering and Programs Management, Panama Canal Authority, will receive the ALL Award along with co-honoree Susan Brennan, COO of Bloom Energy and a ground-breaking executive in the automotive industry, on May 10 at the 2018 AWESOME Symposium.

Following the ALL Award presentation, Ilya and Susan will be interviewed by Heather Sheehan, AWESOME Executive Director, in an Up-Close Conversation focusing on their careers and their leadership lessons.

The article on OZY.com described Ilya as “a top exec in a 10,000-person organization that includes just 1,200 women…a trailblazer in an industry dominated by men — in a region known for its machismo culture.” Ilya was the chief engineer for the massive nine-year expansion project, completed in 2016, that added a third lane to the 100-year-old Panama Canal.

The article quotes Karen Smits, whose Ph.D. thesis examined cross-cultural collaboration in the canal expansion, as saying, ”Many credit de Marotta’s leadership for steering the project around obstacles. She has ‘soft skills that are sometimes missing in this engineering world.’”

OZY.com is a news website that describes its role as “profiling the people, places, trends and technology that are ahead of their time and worthy of yours.”