Ana Sol Gutiérrez was born Ana Emma Sol Perez in Santa Ana, El Salvador. She was five years old when she first came to the United States when her father, Jorge Sol Castellanos, was named a founding director of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. After living in El Salvador, she returned to Maryland to continue her education, graduating high school from Montgomery County Public Schools, and later received a BS in Chemistry from Pennsylvania State University. She also studied abroad at L’Universite de Geneve in Switzerland, where she met and married a Bolivian student, Fernando Gutiérrez. After returning to the U.S. and starting a family, she continued her studies, which led to a MS from American University in Scientific and Technical Information Systems and post-graduate studies in Engineering at the George Washington University.

With over thirty years in the public and private corporate sector, Ms. Sol Gutiérrez has experience working as a systems engineer, and experience with strategic planning, program management and computer engineering. As President and CEO of Sol Quality Systems, Inc., she started a small business providing management and engineering services. Recently, she retired as a senior executive with Computer Sciences Corporation, as Director of Strategic IT Consulting and Quality Management.

Ms. Sol Gutiérrez received a political appointment from President Clinton to the U.S. Department of Transportation, as the Deputy Administrator of the Research and Special Programs Administration (RSPA). She directed the agency’s safety, regulatory, and research and development programs, with oversight of major national transportation safety programs including Hazardous Materials Transportation Safety, Pipeline Safety, and Emergency Response.

A longtime political activist, she was elected to the Maryland House of Delegates in 2002, representing Montgomery County’s District 18, making her the first Latina ever elected to serve in the MD General Assembly. From 1990 to 1998, she was elected to the Montgomery County Board of Education in Maryland, and served both as President and Vice-President of the Board. She was, at that time, the only Hispanic high-level elected official in the Washington area. She holds the distinction of being the first Latina elected to this position in MD and the first Salvadorean-American elected to public of?ce in the history of the USA.

Ms. Sol Gutiérrez is truly multicultural; having lived over fifty years in the United States, traveled extensively and worked in Switzerland, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru. She is trilingual, speaking fluent Spanish, English, and French. She is the mother of three sons, Fernando, Alex, and Rodrigo. She currently lives in Chevy Chase, MD.

Additional Resources: Maryland House of Delegates official biography. View video of Delegate Gutierrez accepting her award at the AILF event March 24, 2006, in Washington, D.C.