Alumni Excellence Awards: Rising Terp Recipent Catalina Mejía ’18

Around the globe, generative artificial intelligence – or GenAI – is reshaping the way businesses and individuals use technology. From chatbots to personalized advertising campaigns, GenAI is hailed as a creative and efficient way to engage users.

Catalina Mejía ’18 is helping to make it all happen. She’s a content manager at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp, whose AI Studio allows users to create customized chatbots that can do everything from generate memes to give travel advice. Since AI Studio launched in July 2024, the tool has been used to create hundreds of thousands of technological aides.

“I feel incredibly fortunate to be part of a team and a company that is playing a key role in pioneering how AI can be used,” says Mejía, who lives in New York City. “As someone who’s always up for a challenge, I am absolutely in the right place because there are plenty of challenges to tackle every single day.”

GenAI is different from traditional rule-based AI in that it can learn from data and generate its own ideas.

Since joining AI Studio full time in 2021 as a content curator, Mejía has helped develop such AI characters as Dodo, Gladiator II, and Love is Blind, smart features that encourage user creativity.

“Whether it’s creating a chatbot for fun or for a specific purpose, creativity is at the center of it all,” she says. “Tools like Meta AI are saving people time and making tedious tasks more approachable.”

A life in tech wasn’t Mejía’s initial career ambition. At Maryland, she pursued broadcast journalism, double majoring in Spanish and international business (with a minor in tech entrepreneurship). She covered local news for NBCUniversal and Telemundo, both in Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas.

After interning at Meta in 2016, she decided to return to the company to help with its editorial efforts. As the company leaned toward AI, so did Mejía.

"You can plan all you want, but things will often turn out differently—and sometimes, even better than you could have imagined," she says.

Mejía traces much of her success to her time at Maryland, where she felt comfortable taking chances and being fearless. In College Park, Mejía was a fitness instructor, tour guide, president of the entertainment programming board (SEE), and a member of the Phi Chi Theta business fraternity.

"Maryland fostered a mindset of being open to trying new things and betting on myself," she says.

Apart from her life in tech, Mejía holds another distinction: a longtime dancer, she is acknowledged by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the youngest Zumba instructor – at 11 – ever documented.

While AI has generated no shortage of fears that human jobs could be replaced, Mejía is circumspect. Creativity and critical thinking are intrinsic human traits that AI cannot replicate, she asserts.

“I’m of the mind that AI will be used as a complement to human ability,” she says. “I encourage people to embrace it with curiosity, and honestly try to learn about it and try it out. AI is here to serve humanity, not replace it.”