Maria Elena Torano has been widely recognized in various national and international circles for over forty years. Starting her career in a commercial cleaning plant still existing in Miami, Maria Elena has traveled many roads, most unfamiliar to Hispanic women until recent years. Maria Elena follows Dir. Eduardo Padron in the number of Presidential appointments received. Closing her professional career in 2000 when she retired from the companies she founded, Maria Elena used her time to become and art collector and a patron of the arts. An insatiable traveler, she has visited over one hundred countries as an international business executive, a US diplomat visiting areas of conflict such as a changing Soviet Union in 1991, flying to the DMZ which divides North and South Korea and having the opportunity to exchange glances with the North Korean soldiers who guard the zone and visiting some of the tribes who reside in the Sarengeti region in Kenya. With almost no business experience Maria Elena was able to build three business enterprises which still operate today. What started as a Hispanic marketing communication company in 1980 with clients such as the Miami Dolphins, The Tobacco Institute of America, Citicorp and The Rouse Company developers of Bayside Marketplace in downtown Miami evolved three years later as a management consulting firm and IT services company in Washington., DC. Having learned how the Federal Government used contractors for the myriad of needs of the various agencies Maria Elena concentrated in IT and was contracted to develop the first Personnel Management system for the Department of Defense Contract Audit Agency, where her company remained as a contractor until her retirement in 2000. META also worked with the Us Department of Energy doing a five year study of the existing contamination of the major sites where US nuclear weapons were built during World War Two and presented the results to the US Congress for the allocation of funding for the removal and storage of the existing nuclear waste. In 1989 with the first of two financial crises the US has experienced during the last twenty years METEC became the largest MWBE with the Resolution Trust Corporation RTC an independent organization created by Congress to manage and dispose of the toxic assets sitting in most US Banks. During the five years of RTCs operation METEC managed and sold over one billion dollars in non-performing assets and was duly recognized by Lamar Kelley the number two person as the most efficient contractor working for the RTC. However, being a success story and consistently rating well among the largest 500 Hispanic owned companies in the US by Hispanic Business Magazine did not distract MET from serving in other important capacities. The third of three Presidential appointments and one which required confirmation of the US Senate, MET served as a member of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy an oversight board of the United States Information Agency. USIA was created after WW2 to inform the people of the world of the principles and values of the Democratic system.