His Mission: Connecting and Helping — and Defying Expectations
In high school, Robin López never could have predicted that one day he’d become mayor of Albany, the city adjacent to his hometown of Richmond. At one point his gradepoint average was 1.7 and school officials placed him on a vocational track.
“We weren’t the students [the school] was going to give up on entirely, but we also got rendered as the students who they didn’t think were university material,” he says. “You start internalizing that.”
But in late 2024, López flipped that old script when he was one of three SFSU alums making history in the Bay Area. López (B.S., ’15) took office as the first person of Latino and mixed-Indigenous (Purépecha) ancestry to serve as the mayor of Albany, while Eddie Flores (MBA, ’19) was sworn in as the first Salvadoran immigrant mayor in South San Francisco and Belle La (B.A., ’04) became the first Asian American elected to Pleasant Hill’s city council.
Back when López was living in Richmond as a high school student, the city had a reputation of being a high-crime area. Many of López’s friends had run-ins with law enforcement or were victims of gun violence. After López made a few failed attempts at college, the sudden death of his best friend fueled him with a renewed purpose: earning a college degree in civil engineering.
He enrolled in Contra Costa College and later SFSU’s School of Engineering — both for the second time. At SFSU, he joined Alpha Phi Omega, a fraternal service organization, eventually becoming its service vice president.
He co-chaired the group’s AIDS Awareness Day, promoting testing and providing resources to students with HIV. That’s when he felt the power of advocacy.
“I like the idea of being a connector and facilitator,” he says. “Bringing people together and providing service was really dope. I attribute a lot of those skills to me being an effective leader now.”
The father of two went on to earn a master’s degree in Engineering from San José State University. He then pivoted to environmental science and is now a Ph.D. candidate in Environmental Science, Policy and Management at the University of California, Berkeley, living in student housing in Albany. Wanting to get involved in his community, he joined Albany’s Social Economic Justice Commission. In 2022, he ran for the five-person city council and won. He’s enjoying his time in city government but doesn’t plan to ascend higher. His true passion is students: He wants to become a professor at a California State University. He hopes to leverage his time in office to again be a connector and facilitator, but this time for students looking for internships and jobs.