Sandra Begay, the daughter of a Navajo tribal leader and a public health nurse, is a member of the Navajo Nation and she has been an engineer for 32 years. 

Sandra earned an Associates of Science degree in Pre-Engineering, a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil Engineering from the University of New Mexico (UNM) and a Master of Science from Stanford University in Structural Engineering with an emphasis in Earthquake Engineering.

Sandra has worked at Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) for 29+ years, where she is a research and development engineer. In 2019, Sandra took a leave of absence and worked for Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller as the City’s Environmental Health Director. Before Sandia, Sandra worked at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory.

From 2002 through 2018, Sandra formally mentored American Indian interns through the Sandia/Department of Energy Indian Energy Program, which she created.  The program will restart in the Fall of 2021.  She is proud to have mentored 42 technical American Indian and Alaska Native college students, which included 24 women interns (60% of the total were women). The interns have become highly regarded technical staff members and leaders within tribal organizations, industry, academia, and non-profit groups.

Sandra has enjoyed 16 years of unique work focused on providing technical assistance to U.S. tribes. Sandra is featured in the American Society of Civil Engineers book “Changing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers." Included in the chapter "Women in Power," Sandra’s efforts were described as providing electricity through solar panels to hundreds of Navajo members.