Glass Half-Broken

 

A PIONEER’S PATH

Professor Regina E. Herzlinger

Growing up in a tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community in 1950s Brooklyn, Regina Herzlinger was determined to have a career. “I was always a great reader and very curious—I read an entire children’s encyclopedia by the age of five—but I was also interested in being financially secure,” she explains. “My family were Holocaust victims who had lost everything—family and resources—and I wanted to become financially secure in a way that couldn’t be taken away from me, and to be a professional.” To further this goal, she took the unusual step of leaving the community to enter MIT, studying economics, in the early 1960s. After graduating, she had to forge a path that actualized her capabilities and ...