When my wife informed me that we were scheduled to attend the National Women of Color Technology Awards Banquet on October 21, 2006 at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel in downtown Atlanta, I was clueless as I had never heard of the organization. Yet Saturday evening’s banquet was the culmination of a three day conference that supports and recognizes minority women in technology careers. It was the 10th conference involving women in information technology, computer science, information science, bioinformatics, engineering and digital arts and systems.
After a few opening remarks by the mistress of ceremonies, CNN anchor /editor, Michelle Wright, dinner was served and we were introduced to all-around entertainer and petite fireball, N’Kenge, whose performance was interspersed throughout the evening’s program.
In the awards section of the program, each award recipient was introduced, presented with their award and given the microphone to address the audience for a few minutes. The list of awardees was most impressive: there were rocket scientists, NASA space researchers, engineers, telecom scientists, college professors, entrepreneurs, and military and avionics experts.
The big award winner of the evening was technologist of the year, Dr. Lina Echeverria, a division VP of Corning Incorporated, who was the first woman to enter her geological engineering school in Colombia. She eventually earned a PhD in geochemistry and petrology from Stanford. Her research in the interaction of molecular structures of rocks to pressures, temperature and settings led her to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, DC and to Corning Inc. which hired her as a research scientist in 1983. Lina has developed ceramic coatings for medical purposes and has a patent for the development of multi-component particles through flame hydrolysis as well as one for a process that controls the deposition of fluorine in topaz.
Another award recipient, Dr. Lesia Crumpton-Young, was the first black woman to receive a PhD in engineering at Texas A & M University. She went on to become the nation’s first woman to serve as department chair of an industrial engineering department at the University of Central Florida. Her award was for educational leadership.
When Yuri Brown was director of diversity at US Cellular, the top brass thought that wireless services in eastern Tennessee had reached the saturation point. After Yuri took another look at predominantly Black areas of the region, the first minority agent was trained —there were no minority agents and women of color were not on the radar-- and that store went on to average three times the monthly sales volume of the company’s other far flung stores. That success convinced US Cellular that diversity meant significant market opportunities in a competitive field. Yuri won the award for Diversity leadership.
Patricia Cowings wanted to make her mark in space in the years before a more enlightened NASA would let black women fly. She was destined to make her mark on space research and astronaut performance though she herself stayed on the ground. Armed with a PhD in psychology, she became one of the foremost authorities on biofeedback and developed applications for its use in confronting physical problems caused by stress. For over 20 years, she has planned and conducted research into space induced physiological changes and developed non-medical counter measures. She won the award for research leadership.
While the success of Travis Smiley’s Covenant with Black America stunned the nation—it immediately shot to the top of the best seller lists—it was not a surprise to Denise Pines, director of business development for The Smiley Group or TSG, the communication and advocacy firm for human rights and minority empowerment. Meeting Tavis while jogging one day led to Denise publishing Just a Thought, a collection of his occasional radio commentaries. That success led to commentaries on TV which she leveraged into a regular radio show. From there the media phenomenon continues. The Covenant has become a movement and they are now working on a web site. Denise won the President’s award for community service.
Minh Vuong-Cuong was only 14 years old when communists captured South Vietnam and her father and six older brothers were thrown into jail. She would eventually escape by boat with her brother and sister-in-law to refugee camps and was a penniless 18 year old refugee in 1979 when she arrived in Los Angeles, speaking no English. Working a series of menial jobs, she resumed her education. In just five years, she had earned an electrical engineering degree. She joined Hughes and then Lockheed applying skills in embedded software to lead avionics programs for the C130 and C27 cargo crafts. Minh is best known as the mind behind the “fly and forget” or AMRAAM, advanced medium range air–to–air missile which is a mainstay of the Air Force arsenal. This missile picks the target, chases it across the sky and destroys it. Her award was for professional achievement.
There were many other award winners and each had an interesting story to tell. It was truly an evening of celebration for all the award winners and I was happy to be on hand for the gala event.
