Alma Martinez Fallon
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Alma U. Martinez Fallon (born 1958) is a retired marine engineer who worked for many years on the design and construction of military ships at Newport News Shipbuilding and its successor organizations, Northrop Grumman Newport News and Huntington Ingalls Industries.[1] Originally from the Dominican Republic, she emigrated with her family to the US when she was a child. She was president of the Society of Women Engineers.[2]
Martinez Fallon was born on December 1, in 1958 in Constanza, Dominican Republic, the youngest of three children; her mother was a teacher and her father was a forester. In the mid-1960s they moved to San Juan de la Maguana and then Santo Domingo, and in late 1967 they emigrated to New York City. After a year in public school in Queens, New York, she was educated in a Catholic school. She started her college education at Hunter College, intending to become a mathematics teacher. However, she married at age eighteen, divorced at age 22, left college without graduating, and became a bank clerk in Newport News, Virginia.[3]
In 1984, at age 24, she returned to school, inspired by her bank customers (many of whom were shipbuilding engineers) to pursue engineering instead of mathematics education. She spent an academic year in electrical engineering at Stony Brook University, but then transferred to Old Dominion University, where she completed her degree in mechanical engineering in 1987.[3]