For Minority Doctoral Students

The PhD Project (http://www.phdproject.org) was established by The KPMG Foundation in 1994, following the termination of the Minority Summer Institute (MSI) run by GMAC and AACSB. MSI encouraged minorities at the undergraduate level to look at a career in academia, but did not meet intended expectations. With an investment of just $5,000 each, Bernie Milano, then head of recruiting at KPMG, and Peter Thorp of Citigroup, led a process to shift the model and focus on minorities at the graduate level instead. The PhD Project was launched with additional support from GMAC and AACSB…it worked, and continues to achieve great success!

In 2005, The PhD Project once a program of the KPMG Foundation, became a separate 501(c)(3) with the KPMG Foundation remaining as the primary funder and administrator. The Project receives additional funding from many other prominent corporations In addition, we receive significant funding from the academic community including over 200 doctoral and non doctoral granting institutions. The Project has celebrated many milestones over these past 15 years — doubling and then tripling the number of minority business professors in the U.S. and we look forward to capping our 1,000th professor soon!

VISION

A significantly larger pool of highly qualified African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and Native Americans for positions in management.

MISSION

The PhD Project’s mission is to increase the diversity of corporate America by increasing the diversity of business school faculty. We attract African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans and Native Americans to business Ph.D. programs, and provide a network of peer support on their journey to becoming professors. As faculty, they serve as role models attracting and mentoring minority students while improving the preparation of all students for our diverse workplace and society.

OBJECTIVES

Currently, The PhD Project has 400 minority doctoral student members pursuing their dream. Like you, they were professionals or recent grads satisfying their quest for a high level of achievement and answering the call to mentor. With an expansive network of support, The PhD Project is now helping them prepare for success in academia.

Whether you become involved as a doctoral student, professor, participating university, or supporting organization…just become involved. Learn more by visiting the links on the left.

Participation in The PhD Project is available to anyone of African-American, Hispanic American and Native American descent who is interested in business doctoral studies.

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Risa Lavizzo-Mourey

Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, M.D., M.B.A., is the fourth president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a position she assumed in January 2003. She originally joined the staff in April 2001 as the senior vice president and director, Health Care Group. In 2004, she was voted #22 of the Top 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes Magazine.

Prior to coming to the Foundation, Lavizzo-Mourey was the Sylvan Eisman Professor of Medicine and Health Care Systems at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as director of the Institute on Aging. She was the deputy administrator of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research now known as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality within the Department of Health and Human Services. While in government service, Lavizzo-Mourey worked on the White House Health Care Policy team, including the White House Task Force on Health Care Reform where she co-chaired the working group on Quality of Care.

Lavizzo-Mourey has served on many federal advisory committees, including the Task Force on Aging Research; the National Committee for Vital and Health Statistics, where she chaired the Subcommittee on Minority Populations; and the President’s Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. She recently completed work as co-director of a congressionally requested Institute of Medicine study on racial disparities in health care resulting in the publication of Unequal Treatment, Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. She is the author of scores of articles and several books.

Listen to Dr. Lavizzo-Mourey talk about Childhood Obesity on WashingtonPost.com

Lavizzo-Mourey is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of eight honorary doctorates and numerous other awards, including those received from the Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Health and Human Services, The National Academy of Sciences, American College of Physicians, National Library of Medicine, American Medical Women’s Association, National Medical Association and University of Pennsylvania.

Lavizzo-Mourey earned a medical degree at Harvard Medical School, followed by a master of business administration at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. After completing a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her geriatrics training.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation conducts research and provides support in the following areas:

Visit their website for more information on their impact across the nation via the organization’s assessment report. They have an awesome website overall and a neat slide presentation builder used to help export data and create slideshows for website visitors.

Follow them on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/rwjf

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If you want someone specific featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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Dr. Mark Dean

Mark Dean is an inventor and a computer scientist. He holds three of the nine original IBM patents upon which the IBM PC personal computers were based. He led the team that developed the ISA bus, and he led the design team responsible for creating the first one-gigahertz computer processor chip.

Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, Dean holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tennessee, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Dean is the first African-American to become an IBM Fellow which is the highest level of technical excellence at the company. In 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Currently, he is an IBM Vice President overseeing the company’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

Mark Dean 1998 holding the first Gigaherz (1000mhz) chip

Dean led a team that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, such as modems and printers, to be connected to personal computers. Dean made history again by leading the design team responsible for creating the first 1-gigahertz processor chip, another significant step in making computers faster and smaller.

Dr. Dean has said

“when I was accepted at Stanford I had been out of school for ten years, so it was very difficult. I encourage people to go on to graduate school, but they should not wait as long as I did. It makes it very hard, But for me it was definitely the right thing to do and Stanford was the right place to do it. In hindsight, Stanford was the best choice because I already knew what I wanted to work on and both David Dill and then Mark Horowitz enthusiastically supported me in pursuing the research tropic I wanted to work on. The research I engaged in as a graduate student was very prudent, in that while some of the technology isn’t necessarily what we are doing today, it did allow me to better understand the best ways (pros and cons of certain approaches) to approach the development of processes. I came to Stanford with no knowledge of either circuits or processes, I knew logic design, architectures, bus interfaces and protocol, but I had no real knowledge of transistors, silicon processes and circuits. Stanford was my first exposure to custom circuits design to building things at transistor level. I am now managing a group focused on high-speed circuit design and I couldn’t have done it without the background I received at Stanford.”

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

***In 1995, Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows of IBM’s 300,000 employees. Dean was the first African American to be honored with IBM Fellowship.

***In 1997 Dean was Vice President of Performance for the RS/6000 Division and, along with his colleague Dennis Moeller, Dean was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame which has under 150 members. For inventing “a system that has allowed PCs to become part of our lives.”

***In 1999, as Director of IBM’s Austin Research Lab (in Austin, Texas), he lead the team that built a gigaherz (1000mhz) chip which did a billion calculations per second.

***In 2001 he was elected member of the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) .

***In 2004, Dr. Dean was selected as one of the 50 Most Important Blacks in Research Science.

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If you would like to see someone featured on The Black Scholars Index, please let us know – featured@blackscholarsindex.com

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Henry Lewis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor, and public intellectual. Gates currently serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University, where he is Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Recently, he became the Editor-In-Chief of The Root, a daily online magazine that provides thought-provoking commentary on today’s news from a variety of black perspectives. The site also hosts an interactive genealogical section to trace one’s ancestry through AfricanDNA.com, a DNA testing site co-founded by him.

He went to Yale and gained his B.A. summa cum laude in History. The first African-American to be awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the day after his undergraduate commencement, Gates set sail on the RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 for the University of Cambridge, where he studied English literature at Clare College. With the assistance of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, he worked toward his Ph.D. in English. While his work in history at Yale had trained him in archival work, Gates’ studies at Clare introduced him to English literature and literary theory.

At Clare College, Gates was also able to work with Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian writer denied an appointment in the department because, as Gates later recalled, African literature was at the time deemed “at best, sociology or socio-anthropology, but it was not real literature.” Soyinka would later become the first black African to be awarded the Nobel Prize; he remained an influential mentor for Gates and became the subject of numerous works by Gates.

In October 1975, he was hired as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department at Yale. In July 1976, Gates was promoted to the post of Lecturer in Afro-American Studies with the understanding that he would be promoted to Assistant Professor upon completion of his dissertation. Jointly appointed to assistant professorships in English and Afro-American Studies in 1979, Gates was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. After being denied tenure, he left for Cornell in 1985, and stayed until 1989. After a two-year stay at Duke University, he moved to his current position at Harvard University in 1991. See Gates’ recent blog entry on The Root about the incident that occurred a few days ago in the news.

As a literary theorist and critic, meanwhile, Gates has combined literary techniques of deconstruction with native African literary traditions; he draws on structuralism, post-structuralism, and semiotics to textual analysis and matters of identity politics.

As a black intellectual and public figure, Gates has been an outspoken critic of the Eurocentric literary canon and has instead insisted that black literature must be evaluated by the aesthetic criteria of its culture of origin, not criteria imported from Western or European cultural traditions that express a “tone deafness to the black cultural voice” and result in “intellectual racism.” Gates tried to articulate what might constitute a black cultural aesthetic in his major scholarly work The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, a 1989 American Book Award winner; the work extended the application of the concept of “signifyin(g)” to analysis of African-American works and thus rooted African-American literary criticism in the African-American vernacular tradition.

While Gates has stressed the need for greater recognition of black literature and black culture, Gates does not advocate a “separatist” black canon but, rather, a greater recognition of black works that would be integrated into a larger, pluralistic canon. He has affirmed the value of the Western tradition but envisions a loose canon of diverse works integrated by common cultural connections:

“Every black American text must confess to a complex ancestry, one high and low (that is, literary and vernacular) but also one white and black…there can be no doubt that white texts inform and influence black texts (and vice versa), so that a thoroughly integrated canon of American literature is not only politically sound, it is intellectually sound as well.“

Moreover, Gates has argued that a separatist, Afrocentric education perpetuates racist stereotypes and maintains that it is “ridiculous” to think that only blacks should be scholars of African and African-American literature. He argues, “It can’t be real as a subject if you have to look like the subject to be an expert in the subject,” adding, “It’s as ridiculous as if someone said I couldn’t appreciate Shakespeare because I’m not Anglo-Saxon. I think it’s vulgar and racist whether it comes out of a black mouth or a white mouth.”

Mediating a position between radicals advocating separatism and traditionalists guarding a fixed, highly homogeneous Western canon, Gates has faced criticisms from both sides; some criticize that the additional black literature will diminish the value of the Western canon, while separatists feel that Gates is too accommodating to the dominant white culture in advocating integration.

As a literary historian committed to the preservation and study of historical texts, Gates has been integral to the Black Periodical Literature Project, an archive of black newspapers and magazines created with financial assistance from the National Endowment for the Humanities. To build Harvard’s visual, documentary, and literary archives of African-American texts, Gates arranged for the purchase of “The Image of the Black in Western Art,” a collection assembled by Dominique de Ménil in Houston, Texas. Earlier, as a result of his research as a MacArthur Fellow, Gates had discovered Our Nig, the first novel in the United States written by a black person, Harriet E. Wilson, in 1859; he followed this discovery with the acquisition of the manuscript of The Bondswoman’s Narrative, another narrative from the same period.

As a prominent black intellectual, Gates has focused throughout his career not only on his research and teaching but on building academic institutions to study black culture. Additionally, he has worked to bring about social, educational, and intellectual equality for black Americans and has written pieces in The New York Times that defend rap music and an article in Sports Illustrated that criticizes black youth culture for glorifying basketball over education. In 1992, he received a George Polk Award for his social commentary in The New York Times. Gates’ prominence in this field led to him being tapped as a witness on behalf of the controversial Florida rap group 2 Live Crew in their obscenity case. He argued the material the government alleged was profane, actually had important roots in African-American vernacular, games, and literary traditions and should be protected.

Asked by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole about how Gates would describe what he does, Gates responded, “I would say I’m a literary critic. That’s the first descriptor that comes to mind. After that I would say I was a teacher. Both would be just as important.

In 1999, Gates consulted with Anthony Appiah in the creation of Microsoft Encarta Africana Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Black History and Culture (First edition ed.). Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corp. ISBN 0735600570.

Check out additional work by Dr. Gates.

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If you have suggestions for features on The Black Scholars Index, please contact us immediately – featured@blackscholarsindex.com.

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She has established a family practice that allows her to treat all incoming patients, many of whom are uninsured, and frequently travels by pickup truck to care for the most isolated and immobile in her region. Benjamin is skilled, as well, in translating research on preventive health measures into accessible, community-based interventions to decrease the disease burdens of her diverse patient base, which includes immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, who comprise a third of Bayou La Batre’s population.

A committed local physician, she also plays key roles statewide and nationally, helping others establish clinics in remote areas of the country and serving in leadership positions in such health-related organizations as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Family Physicians. With a deep, firsthand knowledge of the pressing needs and health disparities afflicting rural, high-poverty communities, Benjamin is ensuring that the most vulnerable among us have access to high-quality care.

Obama says Dr Regina Benjamin understands the needs of the poor and uninsured, making her uniquely qualified to be America’s doctor as his administration tries to revamp the healthcare system.

Regina Benjamin, a member of Delta Sigma Theta, Sorority, Inc., received a B.S. (1979) from Xavier University of Louisiana, attended Morehouse School of Medicine from 1980 to 1982, and received an M.D. (1984) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham; she also holds an M.B.A. (1991) from Tulane University. She completed her residency in family practice at the Medical Center of Central Georgia (1987). The CEO of the Bayou La Batre Rural Health Clinic since its founding in 1990, Benjamin has also served as the associate dean for rural health at the University of South Alabama’s College of Medicine and as president of the State of Alabama Medical Association (2002-2003). She became a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2008.

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If you or someone you know should be featured on The Black Scholars Index, please contact us at featured@blackscholarsindex.com

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Dr. Kevin Clark

Kevin Clark, Ph.D. holds a bachelors and masters degree in computer science from North Carolina State University, and a Ph.D. in Instructional Systems from Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Clark is currently an associate professor in the Instructional Technology, and director of the Center for Digital Media Innovation and Diversity at George Mason University.

Before joining the faculty at George Mason University, Dr. Clark was an assistant professor in the Educational Technology department at San Jose State University. Prior to his work in academia, Kevin worked as a designer and senior program manager of educational software and interactive media for Lightspan, Inc. (now Plato Learning), and was the founder/director of a non-profit community-based after-school program in San Diego, CA.

Dr. Clark’s research interests include the role of video games and interactive media in the education of children, particularly from underserved communities. His recent scholarly activities focus on the use of video game design to increase interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, and issues of diversity in the design and development video games and other educational media. Dr. Clark has presented at national and international conferences, and has published numerous scholarly publications. The video below is from The George Lucas Foundation and Edutopia where Dr. Clark and this project was featured.

For more information about Dr. Clark and this project, review this George Mason article.

For more information, please visit http://mason.gmu.edu/~kclark6.

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