40 Under 40 Alumni Spotlight: From Recognition to Impact

Each year, the 40 Under 40 initiative at Heat Treat Today recognizes 40 rising young leaders (ages 40 and younger) in heat treat who are going above and beyond in the industry.

To learn more about what makes someone a quality candidate for this honor, read below to hear from the individuals themselves — alumni of Heat Treat Today’s 40 Under 40 — as they share personal updates and industry insights.

Click this link to nominate yourself, or someone you know, by June 26, 2026.

Olivia Ivone Pánuco Valdés

Since being recognized as a 2024 Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 honoree, Olivia Ivone Pánuco Valdés has expanded her role at General Motors from day-to-day metallurgical support into broader process validation, capacity analysis, and manufacturing strategy. Today, as senior process engineer for gears and shafts in metallurgy, she supports heat treatment validation, material quality, and supplier technical reviews for automotive components.

As her responsibilities have grown, so has the importance of collaboration. While technical expertise remains central to her work, Pánuco Valdés says some of her greatest professional growth has come from learning how to influence decisions across teams and organizations. “Technical expertise creates real impact only when it is combined with collaboration and clear communication,” she notes. She has found that even the best technical solutions only deliver results when suppliers, plant personnel, and business stakeholders are aligned behind a common objective. That mindset has also shaped her work as CQI-9 leader in Mexico, where she focuses on distortion control, recipe development, and scrap reduction initiatives.

One project challenge that stands out involved coordinating multiple teams while improving heat treatment processes and addressing quality concerns. Manufacturing decisions, she notes, rarely happen in isolation and often require balancing metallurgical requirements, production realities, supplier capabilities, and business priorities simultaneously. Staying close to the process, relying on data, and maintaining communication with plant teams and suppliers proved critical to moving those efforts forward.

For young professionals considering a career in heat treating, Pánuco encourages staying curious and spending time on the shop floor to understand how materials behave during processing. As the industry becomes increasingly tied to quality, productivity, and sustainability initiatives, she believes future heat treat leaders will need to pair strong metallurgical knowledge with data analysis, continuous improvement, and cross-functional problem-solving skills.

Sergio Gallegos Cantú

Recognized as one of Heat Treat Today’s 40 Under 40 honoree in 2025, Sergio Gallegos Cantú continues to advance heat treat innovation at Quaker Houghton through research, testing, and simulation. As senior metallurgist for the company’s Global Heat Treatment R&D Center of Innovation, he develops and evaluates quenchants while leading metallography and modeling efforts that support heat treatment applications.

The 40 Under 40 recognition brought increased visibility both within Quaker Houghton and across the industry, opening the door to more complex technical projects. “Projects and client needs often present inherent challenges, and I always aim to find a viable and practical solution to achieve the objectives,” Gallegos Cantú says. “These experiences help me grow, enabling us to deliver better solutions.”

One example involved designing a laboratory-scale quenching system capable of replicating a client’s large-scale process. After months of refinement, the team successfully validated the quenchant in the lab, and subsequent production-scale testing closely matched the experimental results — a milestone that demonstrated the value of combining research with practical application.

Gallegos Cantú encourages early-career professionals to embrace curiosity, remain persistence, and view mistakes as learning opportunities. Looking ahead, he expects the next generation of heat treaters to pair traditional metallurgical knowledge with digital tools such as simulation, data management, and artificial intelligence while adapting to emerging manufacturing technologies and energy-transition initiatives.

Eric Roth

Since becoming a Heat Treat Today 40 Under 40 Class of 2025 honoree, Eric Roth has stepped into a new position as a metallurgical engineer at a steel and iron foundry, where he focuses on heat treatment quality control and product failure analysis.

The transition has reinforced a lesson he considers essential to long-term success: the importance of strong leadership and effective management. Roth says that understanding how people, processes, and business objectives intersect become increasingly valuable as he takes on greater responsibility for product quality and process performance.

Recently, he faced the challenge of adjusting heat treat cycles to meet tighter Brinell hardness requirements for a client application. The effort required him to deepen his understanding of continuous cooling transformation (CCT) and time-temperature-transformation (TTT) curves while producing a pearlitic microstructure — a notable departure from the tempered martensitic structures he had worked with previously.

One principle continues to guide his approach to the profession: safeguarding quality and protecting the reputation that earns client trust. “Your company’s reputation is priceless,” Roth says. “A few scrapped castings is worth scores more than damage to your reputation, leading to loss of goodwill and eventually of business and revenue.”

As experienced metallurgists and heat treaters retire, he encourages younger professionals to seek out mentorship opportunities and absorb as much knowledge as possible from those who have spent decades in the field.