MENTOR
Catherine Berrouët
Principal Systems Engineer at Northrop Grumman Corp.
Catherine I. Berrouët is a Principal Systems Engineer at Northrop Grumman Corporation. She currently serves the Sustainment and Modification of Radar Sensors team in the Colorado Springs area working on an $866 million-dollar contract to uphold and enhance the Air Force’s ability to detect missile attacks early and sustain and modify a worldwide network of ground-based radars which provide critical situational awareness of objects in space. With a leadership style that embraces community and connection, she is the current Women’s International Network Site Chair and active member of the African American Task Force Group, two of the many Northrop Grumman Employee Resource Groups. Recently nominated to attend the Society of Women Engineers 2023 conference, she aspires to continue to support young women in STEM, be a positive role-model for future junior engineers, and increase the percentage of professional representation of minorities.
Catherine received her B.A. in Mathematics and M.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in 2018 and 2020 respectively. During her studies in Biometric Cryptography she developed an optimization algorithm for fingerprint recognition and authentication which earned her the Graduate Leadership Award and an Honorable Mention for Best Poster from the FAU Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. She received another Honorable Mention for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Computational Science and Engineering 2019’s Elevating Mathematics Video Competition from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Catherine is an FAU Graduate Diversity Fellow and has authored publications in the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology and the FAU Undergraduate Research Journal. These contributions to the field originated from her 2-year partnership and awarded Research Assistantship Grant with the Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute.
Catherine’s academic foundations provided extensive experience with technical presentations and she served as a panelist for the 2019 University of South Florida’s CodebreakHers CyberSecurity Summer Program. She was also nominated by her peers to present the winning results of the research project assignment, from the Preparation for Industrial Careers (PIC) Math course, at the Mathematical Association of America’s 2017 Conference. Throughout this experience, Catherine was inspired and discovered the need for mentorship. Her vision to build pairings between multi-leveled, diverse backgrounded students, and the university faculty, came to fruition when she founded the “Dare 2 Bee” Mentoring Program at FAU. Recruited by her future mentors, at the time as an undergraduate student herself, Catherine became the FAU Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)’s Undergraduate Ambassador. Two years later, during her time serving as the AWM FAU Chapter President, she successfully launched the first all-virtual Annual Florida Women in Mathematics mini conference for the FAU Chapter, and she was recognized by the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University with the 2020-2021 Women and Mathematics Ambassadorship Award. Marking her legacy, Catherine was invited to contribute in The Springer publication, a special historical tribute to Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). Catherine’s passion to embrace change and implement a culture of mentorship lives on through her recruited board members.
Catherine was originally born and raised in Miami, Florida and now calls Colorado home where she hikes weekly and snowboards during the winter months. In her past-time she’s an avid reader, tea enthusiast, enjoys playing the piano, blogs about her bullet journaling methods, and is a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner.