Sonya Sakai Lopes ‘86

Sonya Sakai Lopes studied electrical engineering when she attended the Institute on a U.S. Air Force ROTC scholarship, but even then she never confined herself to a single field, indulging interests in business and cognitive science. By now, her willingness to cross professional boundaries has led her far from her original studies.

After graduation, Lopes was stationed in Los Angeles at the Kinetic Energy Weapons Program Office, where she managed weapons contractors. She intended to leave the military after her obligatory four years, but a job conducting felony investigations and counterintelligence for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations enticed her to stay another six. During that time, she also worked on command-wide total quality management (TQM) initiatives, such as improving the process of conducting investigations to speed completion time and save money.

After leaving the military, Lopes married and began raising a family; her two sons are now 12 and eight. Her career took a new turn when, at an MIT Club of Northern California event, she encountered the founders of Partners in School Innovation. Their mission, to accelerate achievement in underperforming Bay Area schools in high-poverty communities, fascinated her, as did their plan to use TQM processes. Lopes joined Partners, but after a year, she decided she needed more hands-on experience to be effective at promoting educational reform. So she became a reform coördinator at an underperforming school in a pocket of poverty in an otherwise affluent district. After she spent four years implementing initiatives designed to improve teaching and administration, students’ test scores rose. But the problem, Lopes realized, was much broader. “I started to see a systemic issue,” she says. School reform worked only with support from districts, which responded to federal mandates. Her next job, at the Stupski Foundation, was national in scope. There she led interdisciplinary teams working in disadvantaged urban districts to navigate political and regulatory hurdles to improve teaching and learning.