Its Black History Month, an opportunity to celebrate, recognize, and highlight the contributions of Black individuals throughout history. In this post, I'd like to reflect on the stories and contributions of two awe-inspiring trailblazers in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine (STEM) fields – Annie Easley and Mary Jackson. Here’s a little background on both women.
Annie Easley
Annie Easley was a mathematician and computer scientist who throughout her 34-year career would contribute to numerous programs at NASA and through her participation in outreach programs would break down barriers for women and people of color in the STEM fields. Her career at NASA started in 1955 when she was hired as one of the first "human computers" doing computations for researchers. When human computers were replaced by machines, she evolved with the technology and became a computer programmer. She developed and implemented code used in researching energy-conversion systems, analyzing power technologies, and for the Centaur rocket. She persevered through discrimination and later in her career took on the additional role of equal employment opportunity counselor to address discrimination issues around gender, age, and race.
Mary Jackson
Mary Jackson was the first Black female engineer at NASA. She started her career at NASA as a mathematician and eventually entered a training program to earn her engineering promotion. The training program was held in a segregated school that she had to get special permission to attend because of her race. She faced this challenge, along with many others, head on and earned her promotion to engineer in 1958. In her two decades as an engineer, she focused on advancing work around the behavior of the boundary layer of air around airplanes and authored and coauthored more than a dozen research reports on this topic. Later in her career she took a position as Langley's Federal Women's Program Manager, where she diligently worked to impact the hiring and promotion of the next generation of NASA's female mathematicians, engineers, and scientists.
These amazing women's stories and contributions to society have served as a source of inspiration for me throughout my pursuit of an electrical engineering degree and throughout my engineering career. Because of STEM pioneers like Annie Easley and Mary Jackson, I became confident in my ability to solve engineering problems and contribute to technical discussions, even when others did not believe in me. The choice to believe in myself led me to pursue a career at GOJO Industries, where I'm responsible for leading engineering and project management teams that deliver technical solutions to solve GOJO's supply chain manufacturing and logistics operations challenges. Through this work, like Annie and Mary, I hope to make a positive contribution to my company, as well as, to society by continuing to solve technical problems in my field and by breaking down barriers for minorities in STEM.