Virginia Tech Roanoke Center Webinars

About the Webinar: Entrepreneurship and Managing Your Business Destiny

Gabe Galvan will share his experiences in business and how to best position yourself for the next steps in your career. He will provide a brief overview of his background and experience through corporate America, then launch into his experience starting two companies in 2020: RevTek Solutions www.revteksolutions.net  and Veriti  www.verititech.com. Gabe will in particular relate how his graduate studies shaped his career and life - and helped prepare him for these new enterprises.

Join the webinar to learn more about the Virginia Tech Master of Engineering Administration (MEA) program and how Virginia Tech’s Commonwealth Campus Centers will be providing support for local clusters/cohorts of MEA students in the Roanoke, Richmond, Newport News and Abingdon regions.

About the MEA Program:

The Virginia Tech Masters of Engineering Administration program is designed for engineering professionals seeking to advance to leadership positions within an enterprise. Graduates learn how to apply engineering expertise in a business context to manage and lead an engineering enterprise toward innovative opportunities.  Courses are offered virtually in the late afternoon or evening to accommodate those working full-time.  This program is a non-thesis, coursework-only degree program, focused applying engineering expertise in management and executive leadership. For more information, visit www.ise.vt.edu/mea.

About the Virginia Tech Commonwealth Campus Centers:

With locations in Richmond, Roanoke, Newport News, and Abingdon, Virginia Tech’s network of Commonwealth Campus Centers works to fulfill the university’s land-grant mission by hosting graduate-level degree programs, creating mutually beneficial community partnerships, providing professional development opportunities, and building collaborations to enrich discovery and learning.

Past Webinars

Educational Leadership Programs

(MAEd / EdS / EdD / PhD)

For over fifty years, Virginia Tech's Educational Leadership programs have preparedaspiring and current educational administrators throughout the Commonwealth and beyondfor the important "next step" in the advancement of their career.

Virginia Tech’s Educational Leadership programs are designed to fit the needs of working professionals with fully on-line and hybrid courses that balances modern academic theory with a focus on practical application.

Virginia Tech College of Engineering Master of Engineering Administration (MEA) Webinar Featuring Virginia Tech Alumna Dr. Alexandra Medina-Borja 

About the Webinar: Engineering Administration and Management Systems Engineering as a foundation to Manage the Performance of Service Organizations

This presentation will walk attendees into the pathways by which degrees in Engineering Administration (MEA) and/or Management Systems Engineering (MSE) from Virginia Tech can catalyze the abilities to manage the performance of large organizations, particularly service organizations. The presenter will describe how this training equipped them with the knowledge and skills to navigate complex and dynamic world organizations. Among solid technical engineering knowledge, the MEA teaches professionals how to plan, execute, and monitor projects effectively, understand the organization as a complex system, and develop the performance measurement mechanisms that help the organization achieve its strategic objectives. In fact, this training provided the skills to collect, analyze, and interpret data to make data-driven decisions to manage change effectively, maximizing performance. The presenter will narrate their own journey from a MEA graduate to manager of Operations Research and Analysis of the largest disaster relief organization in the world and then Head of Evaluation of the National Science Foundation for three years.

At the conclusion of the webinar, learn more about graduate studies at the Virginia Tech Roanoke Center and how the center can support you on your academic journey.

Webinar Presenter:

Alexandra Medina-Borja is an expert on the effective design and analysis of human-centered smart/intelligent service delivery systems. Dr. Medina-Borja first came to NSF in 2012 as a program officer in the Directorate for Engineering and soon became the founding Interim Head of the Evaluation and Assessment capability for the whole agency. From 2014-2017, Alexandra managed the Partnerships for Innovation, Building Innovation Capacity Program focusing on Smart Service Systems. From 2018 to 2023, she held several positions and roles in the STEM Education Directorate. She was appointed Executive Secretary for the Sub-Committee of STEM Education of the Future of EDU’s Advisory Board. Dr. Medina-Borja also managed the organization of the STEM Education 2026 and Beyond initiative, a national conversation about the future of STEM Education in the country; was the lead program officer for the S-STEM program in the Division of Undergraduate Education and acted as Deputy Division Director for the Division of Graduate Education. Dr. Medina-Borja is also one of the founding program officers who spearheaded the Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier core research program since 2016. In April of 2023, Dr. Medina-Borja became the program officer for human-centered engineered systems initiatives in the Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) in NSF’s Directorate for Engineering.

Before joining Academia, Alexandra was the Manager of the Operations Research and Analysis Unit at the National Headquarters of the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., for five years.

Alexandra holds an MEA and Ph.D. degrees from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in Production of Materials Engineering from the Federal University of Sao Carlos in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 2017, she was inducted into the Virginia Tech Academy of Distinguished Industrial and Systems Engineering Alumni.

If you are an individual with a disability and desire an accommodation, please contact Scott Weimer at 540-767-6100 or weimers@vt.edu during regular business hours at least 10 business days prior to the event.