Electrical Engineer Ilesanmi Adesida was born in 1949 in Ifon, Ondo, Nigeria. Adesida enrolled in the University of California, Berkeley and earned his B.S. degree in 1974; his M.S. degree in 1975; and, his Ph.D. degree in 1979. Adesida was awarded an IBM postdoctoral fellowship from 1979 to 1981. His research interests include nanofabrication processes and ultra-high-speed optoelectronics. Link:...

Chief executive officer and chemical engineer Lilia Ann Abron was born on March 8, 1945 in Memphis, Tennessee. Her father was a school principal and her mother was a school teacher who taught art and geography. Abron attended Lemoyne College in Memphis, Tennessee where she received her B.S. degree in chemistry in 1966. She earned her M.S. degree in...

College president, nonprofit chief executive, and physicist George Campbell (1945 – ) is President of Cooper Union, one of the nation’s oldest institutions of higher learning. In 1977 Campbell earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics and then worked for Bell Laboratories for twelve years. Later Dr. Campbell became president and CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in...

Electrical engineer Ayanna Howard (1972 – ) is the creator of the SnoMote robots and the founder of the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology focuses on how to enhance the autonomy of robot functionality. Her SnoMote robots are internationally recognized for their ability to study the impact of climate change in such remote areas as...

Electrical engineer, computer scientist and engineering professor Ralph Etienne-Cummings was born in August 20, 1967 in Mahe, Seychelles to Marguerita Etienne and Eddie Micock. His mother later married Herman Cummings, who formally adopted him. Etienne-Cummings first showed his aptitude for engineering when he fixed the reception on his short wave radio in order to listen to a soccer match....

Electrical engineer and academic administrator Legand Burge (1949 – ) became the Dean of the College of Engineering, Architecture, and Physical Sciences at Tuskegee University in 1999, after a thirty-year career in the United States Air Force. Burge’s engineering career focused on information theory, coding theory, digital signal processing, and communications – areas of research that had become very...