I grew up in a family of six in one of El Paso, Texas's lower-income neighborhoods. We didn't have much in the way of material resources, and neither of my parents had the benefit of a formal education. But what they gave us was something far more durable: an unshakeable work ethic, a fierce belief that education was the path forward, and a sense of family solidarity that still anchors me today. I have never stopped marveling at how two people with so few advantages somehow understood, with complete conviction, that their children's lives could be different — and that they had a role in making that happen. That posture of quiet, sacrificial investment in others was my first model of what it looks like to give your life away for someone else's flourishing. We were raised with a respect for God — a household awareness that something greater than ourselves was present — but it was more cultural than personal, more inherited than owned. That changed during my freshman year in college, when I encountered a campus ministry called The Navigators. Through their approach to Scripture and the genuine care of the Nav Staff member who invested in me over 5 years, I came to personally accept Christ my freshman year in college. That moment didn't resolve all my questions. But it did something more important: it gave me a new center of gravity. I stopped living as though I were the architect of my own story and began learning, slowly and imperfectly, what it means to be shaped by something — and Someone (Jesus) — larger than myself. What has followed across more than 45 years is a story I could not have written. I have watched Christ redeem failures. I have seen Him produce strength in areas where I had genuine weakness. I have experienced His provision in seasons when the path forward was not visible to me. And I have come to understand, through evidence, that faith is not a background feature of a well-managed. My faith is not what I believe on Sunday mornings. It is the lens through which I understand my purpose, my calling, my marriage, my work, and my responsibility to the people God places in my path. That last part — responsibility to others — has become the thread that ties everything together. My wife and I have walked this road together for almost 40 years, and our shared faith has not just been a foundation but a renewable source of direction. We continue to serve together within The Navigators, working specifically with ministry staff couples to help them build and sustain healthy marriages. There is something that feels exactly right about investing in the relationships of those who are pouring themselves out for others — it is tending to roots, quietly, so that what is growing above ground can endure. That same impulse — toward the roots, toward the person behind the achievement — shapes everything I do professionally. I am a professor and department chair at The University of Texas at El Paso, where I hold the Mike Loya Distinguished Chair in Engineering. I founded the nation's first Department of Engineering Education and Leadership, and I have spent my career building programs, curricula, and research initiatives designed not just to advance a field but to develop human beings. I have had the privilege of mentoring hundreds of undergraduate students — many of them first-generation, many of them from backgrounds not unlike my own — and watching them grow into engineers, researchers, and leaders who are now changing things in the world. That is not incidental to my work. That is my work. Early in my career, I founded LIMBS International, a humanitarian organization dedicated to providing low-cost prosthetic limbs to amputees in the developing world. We have now served tens of thousands of people across dozens of countries — people who had been told, implicitly or explicitly, that they did not matter enough to receive care. Building LIMBS was not a side project. It was a direct expression of what I believe: that engineering is most powerful when it is aimed at the people the world has overlooked, and that a life shaped by faith cannot remain indifferent to suffering it has the capacity to address. I hold several U.S. and international patents. I have secured substantial competitive research funding. I am a licensed Professional Engineer and a Fellow of both ASME and AIMBE. I share these things not to impress but to say: I have worked hard, and I have been given much. And precisely because of that, I feel the weight of responsibility to give it back — through my students, through my research, through the marriages I help strengthen, and through the communities, here and abroad, that I have the opportunity to serve. I have learned, often through failure more than success, that faith is not primarily a set of beliefs I hold or disciplines I practice — though it is both of those things. More fundamentally, faith is what God uses to make me into someone I could never have become on my own. It is not a finished product. It is a sanctifying process that is still very much underway. I am not a perfect person. But I have seen that God is working toward something good — something larger than my limitations, and better than what I would have chosen for myself. That is what I want my students to see in me. Not a résumé. Not a title. A life that is being actively shaped by something worth following — and a willingness to walk alongside them while theirs is being shaped too. Outside of work, I love playing tennis and spending time with close friends and family. They are reminders that the most important things in life are relational — and that showing up, fully, for the people around you is a form of faithfulness all its own.