Orlando, Fla.—Coverings selected the winners of its prestigious 2021 Rock Star awards, which includes Jennifer Diliberto Riquelme, a senior development chemist with Mapei. The Coverings Rock Star award is an Emerging Leaders Program that honors the best young talent in the tile and stone industry. All Rock Star winners are being recognized at an awards reception on July 7 during Coverings 2021, which takes place here from July 7-9, 2021. According to Coverings organizers, the honorees will also receive a gift card and an onsite luncheon.
A graduate of the University of Miami with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and a Bachelor of Science in science—and an expert in color science—Diliberto Riquelme specializes in color development in Mapei’s research and development laboratories. According to the company, if a product involves color at Mapei, it also involves Diliberto Riquelme.
During her 10 years at Mapei, she has managed all of the color development of the CQ aggregates that are instrumental to the Flexcolor CQ, Kerapoxy CQ and Kerapoxy IEG CQ lines of grout. She also performed the original color development work for the Elastocolor line. She worked to bring Ultracolor Plus FA and Ultracolor Plus Max to the market as well as Keracolor S and Keracolor U, Mapei said. Diliberto Riquelme also manages the color development for the matching sealants, Keracaulk S, Keracaulk U and Mapesil T Plus.
All of the lab work results in popular products, according to the company; however, there is one project that Riquelme gives special mention: “I did all of the color development across all product lines (cementitious, epoxy, acrylic and coatings) that offered the 15 new colors (#101 to #115) as well as the custom color matching of any cementitious grout, including in the TWA terminal in JFK airport and in the new Terminal B in La Guardia airport,” she said.
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