ERIKA ANDERSON

Bio: Atlanta native Erika Anderson is a self-proclaimed education enthusiast who graduated with honors with Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering from Spelman College and Georgia Institute of Technology, respectively. While progressing through her college studies, Erika worked as a math tutor and teacher’s assistant, served as the Academic Excellence chair on the National Society of Black Engineers’ executive board, and performed biostatics research modeling cellular aging.

Not only was she active on campus during the school year, she spent her summers gaining real industry experience, doing things like analyzing stress/strain data for liquid hydrogen tanks at NASA, performing flight data analysis on plane engines at GE Aviation, and calculating the probability of failure for heat exchangers at ExxonMobil. It was this experience that ultimately landed her a full-time job at ExxonMobil, the company for which she has now worked for the last 5 years.

Being a Mechanical Engineer at ExxonMobil’s refinery in Beaumont, Texas presented plenty of opportunities to grow her technical and leadership skills. As a Fixed Equipment Strategy Facilitator, she led a cross functional team of Mechanical and Chemical Engineers, Unit Inspectors, and Process Operators to perform risk assessments on refinery equipment to identify and mitigate potential equipment failures. From small 2 inch pipe lines to 60 feet tall distillation towers and every type of process equipment in between, Erika’s team ensures that this refinery equipment is fit for service and able to safely refine crude oil to produce end products such as gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, waxes, asphalt and even plastic! As a result of her performance in that role, Erika was recently relocated to ExxonMobil’s Houston headquarters to join their Research and Engineering group as a Reliability Engineer. She now applies her refinery experience and technical expertise to provide engineering support to ExxonMobil’s refineries and chemical plants all across the globe!