ISE Seminar Calendar

Patricia Gavino is a technology and business leader with over four decades of experience applying system thinking to complex, real-world business problems. With a degree in Industrial Engineering, she began her career focused on process optimization, technology implementation, and operational efficiency—skills that became the foundation for a leadership career spanning engineering, consulting, enterprise technology and technical sales.

Throughout her career, Patricia has led large-scale system integrations and organizational transformations across industries including healthcare, financial services, telecommunications, and enterprise software. She has worked at companies such as Baxter Healthcare, Oracle, VMware, and Stripe, often stepping into environments where processes were broken, teams were misaligned, or customers had lost confidence. Her role was to diagnose the system—people, process, and technology—and design practical solutions that worked under real business constraints.

An ISE mindset has been central to her success. Whether launching a national professional services organization, redesigning delivery models, or turning around high-risk projects, Patricia consistently applied core ISE principles: understanding upstream and downstream impacts, reducing variability, aligning incentives, and building repeatable, scalable processes. Many of the problems she solved were not purely technical—they required communication, stakeholder management, and trade-off decisions across competing priorities.

In addition to delivering business outcomes, Patricia is deeply committed to developing people and teams. She has built and mentored engineers, project managers, and technical leaders at all stages of their careers, helping them translate analytical skills into influence and impact. Looking back, she believes that early career success depends less on having perfect answers and more on asking the right questions, learning how organizations really function, and taking ownership of outcomes.

Patricia has mentored people since she started in her first management role early in her career and considers it a core strength. At VMware, Patricia led the recruiting and on-boarding program for the Americas inside technical sales team in Austin, TX. In speaking with students, Patricia’s goal is to connect what you learned in the classroom and life experiences to what you will face in your professional role—how to think in systems, communicate trade-offs, manage ambiguity, and build credibility early in your career. She hopes to share lessons learned from both successes and mistakes with students and professionals, how they can prepare for the realities of engineering in business practices.

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Robbie Plank is a Supplier Quality Engineer with four years of experience leading and executing quality initiatives across manufacturing and supply chain environments. He holds a degree in Materials Science and specializes in cables, connectors, and wire harnesses for the Aerospace and Defense industries.

Throughout his career at companies including Julian Electric and now Northrop Grumman, Robbie has led large-scale initiatives to improve product quality, supplier performance, and production throughput at both the manufacturing and purchasing levels.

Having experienced firsthand the impact of strong mentorship, Robbie is committed to paying it forward by supporting the next generation of leaders. He helps early-career and transitioning professionals translate technical and analytical skills into meaningful organizational influence.