By Tyffani Caddy
Recognizing Southern Nevada’s technical achievers, Vegas Inc. and Cox Business awarded Ms. Ellen Noto the eighth annual Top Tech Exec Award for Education on Thursday, Nov. 1 at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts. Ms. Noto, a teacher of Chemistry Honors and AP Research, did an interview for Vegas Inc. after winning the award, speaking about how her teaching career began.
“We were at the event, and I was very surprised and shocked and then nervous because I had to speak,” Noto said. “I was very excited to win and represent Coronado.”
Noto was raised in Western Massachusetts and later moved to Southern Nevada in 2012 to be closer to the rest of her family. She started working as a chemistry teacher for Coronado in 2014.
Noto went to college at Tufts in Medford, Massachusetts to be a part of their Engineering and Liberal Arts programs. She went on to become a chemical engineer in the environmental field. After Tufts, she became a part of the Mid-Career and Science program at Harvard.
She is the adviser of the robotics program for 47 students who design, build, and program robots for a different challenge every year. They compete in multiple competitions like flipping caps and pushing robots off platforms for points.
The students are her favorite part of her job though. Whether in the classroom or helping with robotics, she is always thankful to have “such bright students that teach her just as much as she teaches them.” Even with her professional career in chemical engineering, she chose to teach. When comparing the CEO’s and adults to the young adults she gets to work with now, teaching is “incomparable.” The feeling of teaching and sharing her love of math and science was all she needed to make her decision.
“While I did love science and math, in my heart I always wanted to become a teacher,” Noto said.
