Janice Villamil was born and raised in Puerto Rico and attended The University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez, where she majored in Electrical Engineering. During College, Janice took advantage of an Internship opportunity with Abbott Laboratory’s Corporate Engineering Division which brought her to Chicago, IL. For two summers, she worked as an Intern-Control Systems Engineer assisting with the installation and start up in a variety of process equipment. During that time, Janice became experienced in control systems, data communication, wiring interfaces, trouble shooting and equipment installation processes. This internship would serve her well after graduation.
Janice graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Controls and Electronics. After college, she was offered her first job in the missile industry with the Raytheon Corporation, so she left the tropical island for the beautiful deserts of Tucson Arizona. This position gave her the opportunity to participate in flight test events for the Tactical Tomahawk program. For the preparation of test flight, she was heavily involved with testing and integration of the weapons major components in addition to running the HIL (hardware in the loop) for end-to-end testing. This experience motivated her to learn more about the system level components in a missile and how they interact.
By the fall of 2004, Janice determined that she wanted to reside closer to Puerto Rico and was offered a new position in Orlando, Florida, with Lockheed Martin. This position provided her the opportunity to excel and tackle immense challenges, while remaining in the missile industry.
For the past 11 years, she has enjoyed working in algorithms design and test and integration because it involves challenging work and problem solving. Janice’s passion is understanding the root cause and how to mitigate risk, because it requires outside-the-box thinking to generate new ideas.
One of Janice’s greatest achievements was being responsible for unveiling the Multi-Missile Simulation to the Office of Naval Research (ONR) leadership and being one of the key contributors to the winning a key contract to further develop this capability. She personally presented the Multi-Missile algorithms to a panel of academics and subject matter experts (Navy personnel) at China Lake, CA for the validation of her design and approach of the Multi-Missile Simulation. In addition, Janice saw the design of her obstacle avoidance algorithm come to fruition and witnessed a successful flight test event where this was one of the main objectives.
Janice has sustained a very substantial and successful career in the missile industry for more than 17 years. Her superior technical skills, plus her ability to build strong joint relationships with both Industry and Government, are a testament to her unlimited growth potential. Great Minds in STEM is proud to feature her as our Professional of the Week.