Always being the only girl on her school’s Olympics of the Mind competition team helped spur Regan Gallo to pursue her dream and achieve a career in the engineering field, writes Brian McCullough for the Daily Local News.

Today, Gallo is Director of Operations in Roofing at CertainTeed, a Saint-Gobain subsidiary with its North American headquarters near Malvern. Since making it to the top, she has also not forgotten all the women and men who helped her get where she is, and she uses every opportunity to pay it forward by mentoring other young hopefuls in the field, especially women.  

“I haven’t felt any kind of roadblock in this field,” said Gallo. “The main thing I want to do is get women more interested in the sciences and manufacturing fields.”

To recognize her efforts, the Manufacturing Institute will be honoring Gallo with the Women in Manufacturing STEP Ahead Award at its gathering in Washington, D.C., in April.

The STEP Ahead Awards honor women who have shown both excellence and leadership in their careers and who represent the entire spectrum of the manufacturing industry, from the factory floor to the corporate suite. The awards are part of a larger initiative aimed at promoting the role of women in the manufacturing industry by focusing on the attraction, development, advancement, and retention of high-potential female talent.

Pamela Watkins, Saint-Gobain’s Vice President of Talent Acquisition and Development for North America, emphasized that while women get about half of all college degrees in the country, they still lag behind in technical fields. This is why Saint-Gobain supports STEM programs in schools and regularly reviews its workplace practices to make sure they are inclusive.

Gallo, who started her career with Saint-Gobain in 1998, quickly progressed from process engineer to her first management role. She has also acted as an official mentor for the Saint-Gobain Mentoring Program and been responsible for the career development of Process Systems Plant Managers.

Read more about Regan Gallo on the Daily Local News here, and check out previous VISTA Today coverage of CertainTeed here.