President and other members of the Board of Regents

Engineer Hipólito Mejía, Former President of the Dominican Republic who honors us with his presence on the occasion of the graduation today of his grandson David Antonio Mejía Handar, as a graduate in commercial engineering, suma cum laude. The third of his grandchildren who graduated from INTEC.

Engineer Claudia Pellerano, President of the Board of Directors of the Las Américas Free Zone and President of the Association of Free Zones of the Americas (AZFA)

Vice-Rectors, Deans and other members of the Academic Council

Directors, coordinators, teachers and collaborators all

Special guests

Representatives of universities and other HEIs

Members of the media

Dear graduates, dear graduates and families

All friends, good morning:

The first graduation of the first year of the next 50 years of INTEC brings us together today.

That's how it is. Last year we celebrated our first 50 years with the motto: A legacy that inspires and moves us to the future. With this spirit we launch this, the first of our next years and we do it in the best way, delivering to society 841 graduates, 509 ladies and 332 gentlemen, for a total of 36,693 graduates, always attached to the commitment to academic excellence and the formation of socially responsible and professionally competent citizens.

Today we graduated 531 undergraduate graduates and 310 at the postgraduate level.

Today 55 education professionals are graduating for the secondary level who receive their bachelor's degrees in physics, mathematics, biology and social sciences; 36 graduate with honors and of these, 18 do so Summa Cum Laude. 

As a sample of the diversity that is INTEC, in this group we have students from the greater Santo Domingo, but also from communities such as: Higüey, San José de Ocoa, San Cristóbal, Vallejuelo and other municipalities of San Juan de la Maguana; Paradise, in Barahona; Guayabal, in Azua; White Stone, in Monsignor Nouel; and Yamasá, in Monte Plata.

Six members of the Apolo 27 team program, made up of students from our different majors, are graduating today, and who last year won first place in the world in the university division in the Stem Engagement Award of the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge 2022, competition organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Before, in 2020 27 had also won first place in the world in one of the categories of the “System Safety Award” (Security System Award), from the Human Exploration Rover Challenge program, n designing the best security system for a rover, as the vehicles that could be used in future expeditions to planets, moons and other stars are called.

Our graduating today from the Apollo 27 series of teams, whom I beg to stand up by mentioning, are:

1. Julio Francisco Núñez - La Vega - Electronics and Communications Engineer, MCLs, FEET.
2. Thais Contreras - Bonao - Software Engineering, SCL.
3. Mariely Toribio - Dajabón - Mechatronic Engineering, FEET.
4. Carla De La Rosa - Herrera, Santo Domingo - Degree in Business Engineering, MCLs.
5. Juan Castillo - Los Ríos Santo Domingo - Mechatronic Engineering.
6. Manuel María – Los Ríos Santo Domingo - Mechatronic Engineering.

For them I ask all of us to acknowledge them with a round of applause.

And right now, while we're here, the team Apollo27, which is constantly being renewed and whose achievements have elevated the name of our country, is located at the NASA research and development center in Huntsville, Alabama, participating in the 2023 edition of the competition NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge. Let's add our wishes of success for those representatives of the country!

As we have seen, with only one campus, in Santo Domingo, INTEC is a magnet that attracts talented and industrious young people from all corners of the country. Our last internal survey gave us the data that 39 percent of our undergraduate students come from the provinces. We are deeply pleased to know that part of these students are benefited by government programs such as the Teachers of Excellence program, which finances new education professionals trained with attention to high academic standards, or with scholarships awarded on merit such as those of the INTEC Program with which Outstanding Students (FEET). That is why without any modesty we insist on asking for collaborations of small and large sums, all important, to give sustainability to this program that we started in the mid-eighties.

Looking to the future INTEC reaffirms its commitment to the incessant search for academic excellence, thus contributing to the social transformation of the country and the improvement of the quality of life of all Dominicans. With this mission we have built ourselves as a hive of everyone, in which, beyond any socio-economic, cultural, gender, age or ideological or political preference difference, we integrate with a vocation for equality and solidarity.

We want to be an elite, yes, without hesitation or modesty. But an intellectual and academic elite, based on that type of merit and the requirement of effort and dedication, otherwise inclusive, with no other exclusion criteria at our entrance door and our permanence regime. And that is why thirty percent (30%) of our students receive scholarships or discounts on their studies with us.

The examples that we have seen from the participants in this graduation show us that we practice in deed what we proclaim with our words.

Last week INTEC obtained two new patents from the National Office of Industrial Property (ONAPI). The first stops a regulating device for the descent of cargo tied to a parachute in emergency situations, the ingenuity of our professor Edwin Sánchez, together with Pedro Germán and Erick Francisco Castillo Estévez, now graduates of mechatronic engineering. This invention seeks to guarantee the delivery of food and medical supplies in situations of emergency, calamity or difficult access. The device tries to counteract the deviations in its descent, so that they actually land within a predetermined perimeter.

The second was awarded to an anti-theft device for motorcycles capable of immobilizing them once parked. Jose Luis Hernández, who approached INTEC with the idea and received the support of a team of our researchers, including Professor Iván Emilio Jiménez Durán, today's mechatronics engineering graduates Brayand Starling Mora Vargas and Gregory Gerald Pozo Batista. INTEC, thus, is open to innovators from within and outside its institutional borders.

We have now reached a total of 12 patents, reaffirming ourselves as the undisputed leading university in this important line of research and innovation activity in the country.

INTEC is constituted, as well as a privileged space for quality training and research, cultivating professional skills, human values ​​and social commitment and promoting creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation in the manner shown by the examples of Apolo 27 and our patents.

And it is thus, with this class of new graduates and with this display of our achievements, that we begin the first year on the road to our second fiftieth anniversary, supported by the first, which is a legacy that inspires and moves us to the future.

Let me now introduce Claudia Pellerano who we have the distinction of receiving today as our guest speaker.

As Systems Engineering and specialization in project implementation, he began his professional life in the telecommunications sector, in which, for seven years, he was in charge of technological transformation projects at the then Dominican Telephone Company (CODETEL).

He moved to the industrial sector when he joined the Zona Franca team more than 25 years ago  Industrial de las Américas as director of the Marketing, Sales and Institutional Relations area. She was then promoted to vice-presidency of the Board of Directors, and seven years later she became its president. The Industrial Free Zone of the Americas is one of the largest parks in the region, which currently has more than 30 years of operations, 35 multinational companies as clients, and more than 20,000 employees.

Along with this important position, Claudia is the President of International Logistics Solutions, a company focused on outsourced logistics services. And in addition to his business functions, he is a founding member of the Dominican Republic chapter of the Operación Sonrisa Foundation, which has dedicated itself to helping, through free reconstructive surgeries, low-income patients with malformations such as cleft lip and/or palate, in which he has assumed the positions of vice president and president in multiple periods.

Claudia is also First Vice President of the Dominican Association of Free Zones (ADOZONA) and a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council of Export Free Zones of the Dominican Republic.

After having been vice president of the Association of Free Zones of the Americas (AZFA) for 4 years, she has become the first woman to assume the presidency of this important international association, the most important in all of Latin America, which has 70 affiliates of more than 21 countries in the region, integrating representatives of the trade union sector, government entities and the private sector.

I want to take leave, with Claudia's permission, because as a long-standing inteciano, I cannot help but remember who was a great friend of INTEC, his father, the engineer and businessman Luis Manuel Pellerano Amiama, Mr. Chiqui, to whose memory I pay my most heartfelt tribute.

INTEC is an inclusive and diverse community that also rejoices in having a student enrollment with gender parity, 50 percent women and 50 percent men, and for this reason we must be deeply pleased to now have the participation of Claudia who has broken paradigms as a woman and businesswoman, successfully assuming responsibilities that were traditionally reserved for men and who, along with her professional and managerial achievements, combine her sensitivity to social service.

That is my invitation, to the young women and also to the young people who are graduating today, to embark on their new paths with the Intecian seal to forge a dignified and promising future for you and yours, but always accompanying your competent and innovative professional performance with a responsible, ethical and high-minded citizen exercise, which can also include their contributions to social service, as our speaker has been able to do.

As I congratulate you, dear graduates, and your families, on this very important day in your lives, I am pleased to leave you with this thought of Winston Churchill, the legendary Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who rightly made us see that: “Chichiguas - kites, he said - rise higher against the wind, not with it.".

Thank you very much and again, congratulations and continued success!