Graduating ISE Senior Avery Gonzales is a true renaissance woman: a marathoner and master researcher who already has a job lined up at United Airlines.
When Avery Gonzales heads out for a long run, problem sets and deadlines fall away. What replaces them is something closer to clarity—and, often, solutions.
“When I am out there, especially on a beautiful trail, my mind feels very elevated, very free,” she says. “I feel like I am flying. And that is also where I tend to solve all of my problems.”
Running is the most important thing in her life. It is also, Gonzales says, why she became an engineer.
Gonzales, 22, is a graduating senior in USC Viterbi’s Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. A Director’s Scholar with a 3.7 GPA, she has conducted research on an aviation safety issue and secured a full-time role with United Airlines. Last fall, she finished her first marathon in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and qualified for the iconic Boston Marathon.
A Runner’s Eye for Systems
Gonzales began running at 14, out of shape and unable to cover half a mile without stopping. Eight years later, she was logging up to 45 miles a week. Her training was built around VO2 max intervals, high-intensity workouts that push the body to use oxygen more efficiently, and she tracked metrics like aerobic capacity, speed and heart rate to measure her progress.
“Running is all about efficiency and optimization,” she said. “You are always paying attention to small variables like pacing, breathing and recovery, and figuring out how they affect your performance. It is just like engineering, where you break a system down, identify what is limiting it and make targeted improvements. I kind of view myself as an engineering project.”
That mindset shaped her academic path. She entered USC as a biomedical engineering major, drawn to the field’s technical rigor, but soon found her interest pulling elsewhere: away from individual components and toward how entire systems function and where they break down.
She later switched to ISE and added a business finance minor, which she sees as a critical complement: understanding the real-world impact of improvements in terms of cost, value and results—not just efficiency.
The Dangerous Business of Runways
Starting in her junior year and continuing for nearly a full academic year, Gonzales studied runway incursions at U.S. airports. A runway incursion happens when a person, vehicle, or aircraft enters a runway or its immediate airspace without authorization, creating the risk of a catastrophic collision.
The danger became stark in March 2026. At LaGuardia Airport, a controller cleared a fire truck onto Runway 4 just seconds before an Air Canada Express jet landed at about 100 mph, killing both pilots.
Gonzales approaches runway incursions the same way she handles a bad training week. She breaks the problem into parts and looks for what is failing and why.
Her research points to two main causes. The first is miscommunication, such as pilots mishearing instructions or controllers missing transmissions in a noisy, high-pressure environment. The second is cognitive overload. Controllers managing heavy traffic can lose situational awareness, and even a brief lapse can have severe consequences.
“We have not automated runways, and humans make mistakes,” she said. “This research shows where cognitive load breaks down and where communication fails. That is where solutions need to begin.”
Aviation runs in Gonzales’ family. Both grandparents worked at American Airlines, and her grandmother advanced to senior systems analyst, a role Gonzales admires. That background helped shape one of the most important projects of her undergraduate years.
Into the Hangar
Last summer, Gonzales interned with United Airlines in Chicago on the heavy maintenance strategy team. Heavy maintenance is the most intensive service cycle in commercial aviation, when aircraft are essentially taken apart and rebuilt every six to 10 years.
Her task was to analyze vendor invoicing and identify inefficiencies. She uncovered a materials tracking problem: There wasn’t a clear or formal system for assigning supplies, which caused costs to differ between locations and made it hard to track what was going on or coordinate effectively.
She visited maintenance facilities, observed processes firsthand and worked with vendors to standardize materials tracking and control. She built an interactive Power BI dashboard to compare performance across sites. Her work was projected to save more than $150,000.
This fall, she will join United’s Chicago headquarters full time, continuing her work in heavy maintenance strategy. Her focus is already on the next challenge.
“I am a person who basically reaches all of the goals I set for myself,” she said. “I accomplish something, and then I think: what is next?”
From Tulsa to Troy
Gonzales grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a curious child who read constantly and built things out of whatever materials she could find. By high school, she knew she excelled at math and enjoyed improving systems, even before she called it engineering.
She chose USC over the University of Pennsylvania after visiting both campuses. USC felt more collaborative and energizing.
“USC really pushes you,” she said. “The academics are difficult, but people also know how to have fun.”
Gonzales said the Trojan network has helped her at every turn. She has made lots of good friends at USC, some of whom mock-interviewed her before job applications. A conversation Gonzales initiated as an executive board member of the Associated Students of Biomedical Engineering led directly to her first internship, at Takeda Pharmaceuticals, where she helped streamline manufacturing KPIs and saved the company more than 90 full-time equivalent hours annually.
Her post-graduation to-do list is short and purposeful: find an apartment in Chicago, start at United, earn a promotion within her first year, then run the Boston Marathon. She doesn’t seem worried about any of it.
“Running is my favorite thing in my life,” she said. “And engineering is how I think about everything. The two are the same to me: you find what is holding you back, you improve it and you keep going.”
Published on April 27th, 2026
Last updated on April 27th, 2026