$10 million gift from Mary and Felipe M. Rodriguez to university will support a new undergraduate program that joins engineering education with business training
Mary and Felipe M. Rodriguez have committed $10 million to the University of Arizona to name and support a new undergraduate program that joins engineering education with business training, a philanthropic investment aimed at strengthening Arizona’s future technical workforce and expanding student pathways into industries from aerospace to health care.
Launched this academic year through a collaboration between the university’s Eller College of Management and College of Engineering, the program will now be known as the Mary and Felipe M. Rodriguez Integrated Business and Engineering Program. University leaders marked the naming at a Tucson ceremony attended by Gov. Katie Hobbs, Sen. Mark Kelly, and senior university figures, including President Suresh Garimella and University of Arizona Foundation President and CEO John-Paul Roczniak.
For the University of Arizona, the gift backs a relatively new academic model: an undergraduate curriculum designed for students who want to move between technical design and commercial decision-making. The university describes the program as Arizona’s only undergraduate offering of its kind, combining engineering design, software, artificial intelligence, and biomedical devices with business analytics, accounting, marketing, and entrepreneurship.
The premise is increasingly familiar to employers, particularly in sectors where technical innovations must move quickly from laboratory, prototype, or production floor to a viable market. The program’s graduates are meant to understand not only how to solve engineering problems but also how to assess customer needs, manage strategy, communicate across disciplines, and recognize commercial opportunity.
Students will work with faculty, advisers, and mentors from both colleges and participate in industry and community projects intended to bring real-world experience into the degree.
“Companies have historically had to choose between engineering expertise and business acumen,” Kimberly L. Ogden, the College of Engineering’s Craig M. Berge Interim Dean, said in announcing the gift. “The education offered through this program means employers can have both.”
The Rodriguezes’ philanthropy reflects their professional experience at precisely that intersection. Felipe Rodriguez founded Aeronautical Systems Incorporated, or ASI, in 1988 and remains its chief executive. The company provides specialized aeronautical engineering, repair and overhaul, manufacturing, supply chain, and fleet support services. Mary Barrett Rodriguez joined ASI in 1993 after teaching in London and California and oversees the company’s charitable-giving program, with particular attention to local education and technical-training initiatives.
In a joint statement, the couple framed their gift as an answer to a persistent divide between invention and execution. “Every great leap in human history happens at an intersection,” they said, recalling instances in aerospace when promising technical ideas did not become businesses, or sound business concepts lacked sufficient technical grounding. Their investment, they said, is intended to build “a bridge between two brilliant colleges” and help educate leaders fluent in both disciplines.
Their connection to the university is also personal. The Rodriguezes have a son who graduated from the University of Arizona with a finance degree, and they said discussions with leaders of the engineering and business schools began during a parents’ weekend visit to campus. What emerged was not simply support for two established schools, but a named platform intended to connect them more deliberately.
The gift arrives as universities face intensifying pressure to demonstrate that academic programs can translate into workforce relevance without narrowing higher education to a single occupational track. The Rodriguez program is positioning itself around that tension: producing technically literate graduates who can also lead teams, navigate markets, and help move ideas into companies, products, and services. Its potential applications stretch across major Arizona industries, including aerospace and defense, medical devices, mining, software, and advanced manufacturing.
Garimella said the commitment will strengthen a program built around career mobility as much as initial job placement. “Their investment will strengthen the only undergraduate program of its kind in the state, equipping Wildcats with the skills they need to step confidently into and grow throughout their careers,” he said.
The $10 million commitment also carries symbolic weight in the university’s larger fundraising story. Roczniak said the pledge contributed to a record $425 million fundraising year and formed part of the university’s Fuel Wonder campaign, which passed its $3 billion goal on June 30. The campaign’s conclusion provides a backdrop for a gift focused not on a building or a traditional department, but on the kind of cross-college training that university leaders believe will shape the next generation of employers, entrepreneurs, and technical leaders.
For the Rodriguezes, whose professional and philanthropic interests have long centered on engineering and technical education, the naming expresses confidence in students who will be asked to work across boundaries that industry has often treated separately. The long-term measure of the gift may be found in whether those students go on to build companies, modernize established employers, and translate emerging technologies into practical solutions—work that, as university officials noted, could create jobs and enterprises not yet imagined.
Photo: The Integrated Business and Engineering Program formally became the Mary and Felipe M. Rodriguez Integrated Business and Engineering Program in recognition of the couple’s commitment to workforce development, engineering education, and student opportunity. From left: Karthik Kannan, dean of the Eller College of Management and holder of the Halle Chair in Leadership; John-Paul Roczniak, president and CEO of the University of Arizona Foundation; Felipe M. Rodriguez; Mary Rodriguez; Sen. Mark Kelly; Gov. Katie Hobbs; Kimberly L. Ogden, Craig M. Berge, interim dean of the College of Engineering; University of Arizona President Suresh Garimella; and Barbara Borgonovi, president of Naval Power at Raytheon.