From working at NASA with dreams of becoming an astronaut to emerging from the dot-com collapse as a top software executive, Luisa Contreiras ’86 takes pride in being an innovator.
For the past two decades and through the dawn of the Internet age, she has been at the forefront of the technological revolution, working for corporations such as Oracle and PricewaterhouseCoopers and serving as chief technology officer to several software companies that develop products for the health-care industry.
Luisa relishes working with technology because the field is constantly evolving; every day promises a new lesson. But she is quick to attribute her professional success to the education she received at Chapin.
“The Chapin education focused on how to think analytically and communicate,” she said. “It provided us with fundamentals that we could apply in all areas of life. In the tech world, it’s so important to be able to communicate your ideas.”
Luisa’s wisdom about the tech industry developed naturally over the course of her career, but it certainly wasn’t planned. She had no intention of creating software when she left Chapin for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1986.
At the time, she had fallen in love with physics, under the tutelage of Chapin science teacher Gene Gardino, and had her heart set on becoming an astronaut. But on her way toward earning a physics degree and after working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, she decided on a different career path.
“I loved the analytical side of physics, but it can be a solitary profession,” she said. “I realized that I wanted to be around people.”
Luisa took a job immediately after college as a systems consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, a job she describes as a high-intensity and exciting introduction to the worlds of both business and technology. It was there that she learned how to write software, a skill she values to this day.
“With a tech background, you’re able to bridge the gap,” she said. “You can speak the language of the people you’re managing, and it gives you credibility.”
“It’s so heartening to see how much technology and science are part of the fabric at Chapin now,” she added.
For Luisa, who described the formula for success in her field as “part art, part science and part luck,” the path hasn’t been without pitfalls. She was working for a dot-com when so many Internet businesses and tech stocks collapsed in 2001 and shared in the calamity that befell the entire sector. Still, she looks back on this with fondness.
“An explosion of profound innovation that took place,” she said. “You put a bunch of smart people in a room and told them to do something that had never been done before. The bubble burst, but a whole new way of life was left standing.”
Luisa, who lives in San Francisco, has for the last 18 years dedicated herself to developing software for the health-care industry and is the chief technology officer at Executive Health Resources, a company that sells physician services to hospitals.
While creating products that improve health care has proved fulfilling, Luisa said she continues to be motivated by the drive to innovate: “The thing that I’m the proudest of is building teams of people who accomplish more than anyone thought they could and, in the end, fundamentally transform a company.”