Mass High Tech Honors Draper Scientist As One of This Year’s “Women to Watch”
Mass High Tech honored Livia Racz, Draper Laboratory division leader for advanced hardware development, as one of its “Women to Watch” for 2010 during a March 19 ceremony.
Racz leads a division of 90 people working on some of Draper’s toughest hardware challenges. She also continues her own research with a cross-disciplinary team responsible for significant breakthroughs in electronic systems design and packaging, enabling a new range of electronic capabilities in ultra-small packages.
Over the past year, Racz’s team successfully demonstrated and produced working units of the densest discrete component electronic packaging methodology in existence. This breakthrough will lead to the delivery of additional systems, and serve as the enabling technology for a wide variety of applications.
Mass High Tech’s “Women to Watch” honor is presented to women in the technology field who will likely take on more senior leadership positions in the future, and already have track records that includeinventions, growing and launching businesses, and leading teams working on new developments.
Racz, who mentors women in the technology community, noted in remarks at the ceremony intended as advice to a sixth grade girl that “it’s not about how smart you are, it’s about how hard you work and how stubborn you are.”
“I’ve known many people who are much smarter than I am, who did not end up successful because they gave up,” she said.
Racz holds both bachelors and doctoral degrees in materials science from M.I.T. She is also a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and sang on a recording of Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloe,” which won the 2010 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance.
Racz serves as a German and Latin diction coach for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and as a Hungarian diction coach and translator for other Boston-area choruses. She has also taught Hungarian as a volunteer for the Béla Bartók Hungarian School of Boston and remains active with the school.