Education

Erich received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from M.I.T. and a B.S., Phi Beta Kappa, in Physics and Mathematics from Morehouse College.

Career

He also leads the development of Newark’s implementation plan for First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” childhood obesity campaign. Prior to government service, Erich worked as an Associate at McKinsey & Company, focusing on public sector projects. There, he led the design and implementation of an improved textbook delivery system for a 50,000-student urban school district, and established and supervised a project management office that coordinated 36 initiatives designed to improve customer satisfaction for a multi-billion dollar company.

Service

Caufield delivers 2004 Commencement at MIT

He has served as an elected member of the Board of Trustees for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), where, as an international award-winning student researcher and Graduate Student Body President, he became the only person in the University’s history to receive all three of its highest distinctions for leadership and student life contributions.

Caulfield delivered MIT’s 2004 Commencement.

He’s certainly one to watch…

—

Information obtained from 2010 White House Fellow Announcement.

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Education

In 1995 he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research interests include various aspects of integrated system test, testable design, and test methodology development. He has consulted for various companies, and is the founder of TestWorks, a Carnegie Mellon University spinout focused on information extraction from IC test data.

Awards & Talks

He received a Career Award from the National Science Foundation in 1997, and IBM Faculty Partnership Awards in 2005 and 2006. He has given over fifty invited talks at many universities and companies that include Stanford, Yale, Texas A&M, Duke, Purdue, Intel, AMD, IBM, Delphi, Hewlett Packard, CISCO, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Freescale, Motorola and Nvidia. He has served on various technical program committees that include the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium, IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design, and the International Test Conference. He also currently serves as an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on CAD. He has published over 70 refereed conference and journal papers and has six U.S. patents or patent applications filed. He is a fellow of the IEEE and senior member of the ACM.

Service

Dr. Blanton is also significantly involved in the recruitment of minority candidates for graduate school. Most of his activities centers on direct recruitment at the annual convention of the National Society Black Engineers. In 2006, he spearheaded the university’s efforts (CMU@NSBE) for the 2006 NSBE convention held here in Pittsburgh. In 2006, Blanton was awarded an Emerald Award for outstanding leadership in recruiting and mentoring minorities for advanced degrees in science and technology.

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Education

Sonja studied electrical engineering at North Carolina State University, earning bachelors and masters degrees with a focus on electric power. She earned a doctorate from the University of Florida, specializing in power system reliability.

Career

She has held academic positions with the Florida Institute of Technology, Norfolk State University and Hampton University, where she taught energy systems and other electrical engineering subjects. Her professional background has also included employment with Carolina Power & Light and Gainesville Regional Utilities, where she held positions in distribution operations, strategic planning, and customer relations.

Awards & Honors

She is a 2005 graduate of United Way’s Volunteer Improvement Program (VIP) and a United Way Community Investment Volunteer. Ms. Magazine recently labeled Sonja a change agent for “the belief that environmental and social consciousness can create satisfaction in the soul and the wallet.” She is the only utilities expert listed at SheSource.org, an online braintrust of female experts on diverse topics designed to assist journalists and producers who need female guests and sources. Sonja is the recipient of the Atlanta Business League’s 2007 Super Tuesday Award for Non-Traditional Business, and she was named a 2008 SuperWoman by the Atlanta Tribune.

See blackEnergy’s profile on Atlanta’s ABC affiliate:

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Arthur J. Bond (born 1917) was the dean of the School of Engineering and Technology at Alabama A&M University in Alabama, and an activist in the cause of increasing black enrollment and retention in engineering and technology. He was a founding member of the National Society of Black Engineers and part of the team that fought for state funding of engineering at Alabama A&M University.

Education

Arthur J. Bond came to Purdue University in 1957 to study electrical engineering on National Merit Scholarship and Purdue’s Special Merit Scholarship. After two years, however, he had to drop out due to a softball injury. After he recovered, he joined the army, “because Vietnam was looming on the horizon,” he would later recount.

Bond returned to Purdue in 1966, was graduated with a BSEE in 1966, MSEE in 1968, and Ph.D. in 1974.

Upon receiving his doctorate, Bond became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Purdue for five years, and then an associate professor at Purdue Calumet. He then went to work in industry for RCA, AlliedSignal, and Bendix.

In 1989, Bond joined Tuskegee University as head of its department of electrical engineering, where he helped the university get reaccredited.

In 1992, Bond joined Alabama A&M as Dean of Engineering and Technology. At the time, the land-grant university was involved in the notorious Knight v. Alabama lawsuit, in which the plaintiff class, joined by the U.S. Justice Department argued that the State of Alabama’s system of public university funding is a violation of equal rights. The case resulted in a 1995 decree that ordered Alabama to fund engineering at Alabama A&M. The ruling further ordered that whatever level of the engineering program that would be built up in nine years would constitute the required level of funding by the state.

As dean, Bond played a pivotal role in meeting the nine-year challenge. A&M’s efforts bore fruit in 1997, when it was able to offer the first engineering courses. In 2000 mechanical and electrical engineering at A&M was accredited with the effective date made retroactive to 1998.

Honors

1994: Minorities in Engineering Award (formerly Vincent Bendix Award), American Society for Engineering Education
2000: Golden Torch Award for Academic Visionary, National Society of Black Engineers
2000: Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer, Purdue University
2005: Distinguished Engineering Alumni, Purdue University

Student Organizing

Bond was a student leader at Purdue during the time when the civil rights movement was in full swing. He would become a founding member of Purdue’s Black Cultural Center and a founder of the National Society of Black Engineers.

At Purdue, Bond led students to demand that Purdue open up its engineering schools to more blacks and women. Frederick L. Hovde, Purdue’s president at the time, was sympathetic to the cause. He appointed Bond to a steering committee, which organized the first national effort to increase minority participation in engineering.

Responding to students’ need for a place where minority students could bond and study, Purdue provided black students with a house, which Bond and his friends would “move in and decorate it and call it a Black Cultural Center,” Bond later said.

More information about Dr. Bond can be found on Purdue’s News website.

National Society of Black Engineers

When two undergraduate black engineering students, Edward Barnette and Fred Cooper, approached the dean of engineering to create a Black Society of Engineers in 1971, the dean agreed and assigned Bond, then a graduate student, to be the group’s advisor. This group would grow into a national organization that is now the National Society of Black Engineers, the one of the LARGEST STUDENT-RUN ORGANIZATION.

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Information obtained from Wikipedia.

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Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston’s four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, a novel which was controversial because it didn’t fit easily into stereotypes of black stories. She was criticized within the black community for taking funds from whites to support her writing; she wrote about themes “too black” to appeal to many whites. Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.)

Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Though Hurston claimed as an adult that she was born in Eatonville, Florida in 1901, she was actually born in Notasulga, Alabama, where her father grew up; her family moved to Eatonville, the first all-Black town to be incorporated in the United States, when she was three. Her father later became mayor of the town, which Hurston would glorify in her stories as a place black Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me“.

In 1904, Hurston’s mother died and her father remarried almost immediately. Hurston’s father and new stepmother sent her away to school in Jacksonville, Florida. She later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. In 1917, Hurston began attending Morgan Academy, the high school division of Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland. It was at this time, and apparently to qualify for a free high-school education, that the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her date of birth. She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918.

In 1918, Hurston began undergraduate studies at Howard University, where she became one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority and co-founded The Hilltop, the University’s student newspaper. Hurston left Howard in 1924 and in 1925 was offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she was the college’s sole black student. Hurston received her B.A. in anthropology in 1927, when she was 36. While she was at Barnard, she conducted ethnographic research with noted anthropologist Franz Boas of Columbia University. She also worked with Ruth Benedict as well as fellow anthropology student Margaret Mead. After graduating from Barnard, Hurston spent two years as a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University.

When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its peak, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston’s short story “Spunk” was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African American art and literature.

In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1927, she married Herbert Sheen, a jazz musician and former classmate at Howard who would later become a physician, but the marriage ended in 1931. In 1939, she married Albert Price, a 23-year-old and 25 years her junior, but this marriage, too, ended after only months. In later life, in addition to continuing her literary career, Hurston served on the faculty of North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) in Durham, North Carolina. She also wrote for Warner Brothers motion pictures, and for some time worked on staff at the Library of Congress.

In 1948, Hurston was falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy, and although the case was dismissed after Hurston presented evidence that she was in Honduras when the crime supposedly occurred in the U.S., her personal life was seriously disrupted by the scandal.

Hurston spent her last decade as a freelance writer for magazines and newspapers. She worked in a library in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and as a substitute teacher and maid in Fort Pierce. During a period of financial and medical difficulties, Hurston was forced to enter St. Lucie County Welfare Home, where she suffered a stroke and died of hypertensive heart disease. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest cemetery in Fort Pierce.

In 1973 African-American novelist Alice Walker and literary scholar Charlotte Hunt found an unmarked grave in the general area where Hurston had been buried in Fort Pierce, Florida and decided to mark it as hers. Alice Walker in the 1970s helped revive interest in Zora Neale Hurston’s writings (with an article called “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston“, published in the March 1975 issue of Ms. Magazine. ), and today Hurston’s novels and poetry are studied in literature classes, women’s studies and black studies courses, and have become again popular with the general reading public. Her life was chronicled by PBS in “Jump At the Sun”.

The New York Times, Zora Neale Hurston's Legacy

Zora Neale Hurston was honored with a stamp, the annual festival named in her honor, a museum, and several other awards of recognition. For more information, audio, and video clips, visit http://www.zoranealehurston.com.

-Summarized from wikipedia, ask.com, zoranealehurston.com, and about.com

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