Dr. Marcos Bolaños
U.S. Department of Transportation
2025 fellow
Dr. Marcos Bolaños is a Safety and Operations Research Analyst for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He is committed to keeping the national airspace system (NAS) safe through rigorous data analysis that allows senior leaders and air traffic controllers to make data-driven decisions. Dr. Bolaños will use his skills as a White House Leadership Development Program Fellow in the Office of the Chief Information Officer for the Office of Management and Budget.
Dr. Bolaños has served in a variety of leadership positions at the FAA, including Manager for the Office of Performance Analysis where he developed analytical tools for forecasting air traffic operations. In his current role with the Office of Safety and Technical Training, he serves as a Data Analytics Expert leading an effort to enhance the agency’s capabilities to assess safety across the NAS. During a six-month detail with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs as a President’s Management Council (PMC) fellow, Dr. Bolaños developed a program to provide lifesaving automated external defibrillators in national cemeteries to protect the employees who maintain our nation’s veteran cemeteries.
Dr. Bolaños received a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University where he developed algorithms for detecting early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease from neural electrical signals. He grew up on a farm in the culturally-rich border town of El Paso, Texas, where he obtained master’s and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at El Paso.
Dr. Bolaños lives in Alexandria, Va., with his wife, Christina, who also strives to make the world a better place through her work on food assistance programs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He is the founder of two scholarships inspired by his parents that support future engineers: the Maria Ofelia Parra Amaro Scholarship for Women Engineers and the Arturo Bolaños Fund for Inventive Thinkers. Dr. Bolaños enjoys writing and recently published his first book, Jaime, which is a collection of stories about his 90-year-old grandfather. Dr. Bolaños also loves traveling, ballroom dancing, and cooking.
