Birth: March 2, 1957, Place: Jefferson City, Tennessee
BS Electrical Engineering, University of Tennessee, 1979
MSEE, Florida Atlantic University, 1982
PhD in EE, Stanford University, 1992
IBM Fellow and Vice President of Systems in IBM Research
Is Mark Dean a computer scientist or is he an engineer? He surely is a tinker. As a boy, he and his father built a tractor from scratch.
Mark Dean's grandfather was a high school principal, his father was a supervisor at the TVA (Tennessee Vally Authority) Dam. One of the few African American students attending his Jefferson City (Tenn.) High School, he was both a star athelete and a straight-A student. In 1979 he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee though he was actually a part of the university's Minority Engineering Program.
After integration, he recalls, one white friend in sixth grade asked if he was really black. Dean said his friend had concluded he was too smart to be black.
"That was the problem -- the assumption about what blacks could do was tilted," Dean said.
That was the same bias Dean said he encountered when he first joined IBM, and a problem that has not completely disappeared.
"A lot of kids growing up today aren't told that you can be whatever you want to be," he said. "There may be obstacles, but there are no limits."
Dean holds 3 of the original 9 patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon: Soon after joining IBM, Dean and a colleague, Dennis Moeller, developed the interior achitecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, like modem and printer, to be connected to personal computers. Then he worked for a number of years before considering the doctorate.
BS Electrical Engineering, University of Tennessee, 1979
MSEE, Florida Atlantic University, 1982
PhD in EE, Stanford University, 1992
IBM Fellow and Vice President of Systems in IBM Research
Is Mark Dean a computer scientist or is he an engineer? He surely is a tinker. As a boy, he and his father built a tractor from scratch.
Mark Dean's grandfather was a high school principal, his father was a supervisor at the TVA (Tennessee Vally Authority) Dam. One of the few African American students attending his Jefferson City (Tenn.) High School, he was both a star athelete and a straight-A student. In 1979 he graduated at the top of his class at the University of Tennessee though he was actually a part of the university's Minority Engineering Program.
After integration, he recalls, one white friend in sixth grade asked if he was really black. Dean said his friend had concluded he was too smart to be black.
"That was the problem -- the assumption about what blacks could do was tilted," Dean said.
That was the same bias Dean said he encountered when he first joined IBM, and a problem that has not completely disappeared.
"A lot of kids growing up today aren't told that you can be whatever you want to be," he said. "There may be obstacles, but there are no limits."
Dean holds 3 of the original 9 patents on the computer that all PCs are based upon: Soon after joining IBM, Dean and a colleague, Dennis Moeller, developed the interior achitecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, like modem and printer, to be connected to personal computers. Then he worked for a number of years before considering the doctorate.
Computer Scientists of the African Diaspora: Mark E. Dean, PhD
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