golden torch award winners - national society of black ... and media... · gold star, and if i...

37th NSBE Annual ConventionSt. Louis, Mo. • March 23–27, 2011

www.nsbe.org94 • nsbe magazine • convention 2011

GOLDEN TORCh LEGACy AWARDNathaniel ThomasIllinois Institute of TechnologyCity Colleges of Chicago

Nathaniel Thomas was born in

Mississippi.“When I was six months old, my mother

said, ‘I’m getting out of here and going to Chi-cago where my kids will get an education.’ Nei-ther of my parents could read or write, and all they knew was picking cotton. All they knew on my report card was whether or not I had a gold star, and if I didn’t, they’d whip my butt. I’d say ‘Mom, you have to have a perfect score to get a gold star,’ and I had a 99 average. But that didn’t save me. She said, ‘Your Dad only knows gold stars or nothing.’ ”

He taught his father to read, so report card time wouldn’t be so traumatic. That would set a pattern: find students who wanted to learn, and teach them at their level.

By 1973, Thomas had earned a bachelor’s in computer science and a master’s in voca-tional guidance and was working as assistant director of co-op education at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The school received a $25,000 GE grant to develop a minority engineering program, and Thomas was asked

to organize a high school recruiting and talent identification program.

At the time, Thomas says, “their bottom line was that black kids couldn’t possibly be as smart as white kids, so we would have to re-mediate them. I went out to find students who could do the work. I had 113 juniors lined up for that program who had engineering profiles but didn’t know what engineers do.”

There were only nine black students in the anemic incoming freshman class of 1974: overall enrollment had declined from 650 to 350. Thomas was asked to take over all recruiting, and for the next three years, the en-tering classes held 801, 898 and 965 students.

“Everything went up,” says Thomas. “The average SAT scores, the ACT scores, the GPA of the freshmen.”

Thomas’ system of finding interested, quali-fied, regional students bolstered IIT’s overall enrollment, enhanced its financial position, boosted its overall standing in the engineer-ing education field and trained hundreds of minority engineers. He left IIT as assistant vice president of External Affairs in 1988 after 15 years of continuous service and 22 years overall at the institute. He then became vice chancellor of Student Services for City Colleges of Chicago and later retired from Roosevelt University as director of the school’s REACH program, in 2003.

“There is a satisfaction you get from being able to do things for other people,” Thomas says. “You can’t put a price on that.”

When the music starts in St. Louis on March 26, NSBE will celebrate its best. The NSBE Golden Torch Awards, now in their 14th year, recognize organizations and individuals who exemplify NSBE’s ideals of academic excellence, professional success and dedication to improvement of the black community. The NSBE Golden Torch Awards ceremony is a great show with a higher purpose. Since their inception, the awards have provided approximately $6.5 million in scholarships to talented high school seniors. Don’t miss this exciting, closing event of NSBE’s 37th Annual Convention: 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m., in the America’s Center convention complex, Halls 4 and 5. Admission is free for all convention attendees.

Golden Torch Award Winners Profiles by roger Witherspoon

Continued on page 96



Corporate Community ServiCe CNG Engineering, PLLC

It is difficult to imagine a small firm with more outreach than CNG. Professionally, the 20-member, black-

owned firm works on the design and oversight of installation of mechani-cal, electrical and plumbing systems in public and private construction projects in the San Antonio, Texas, region. Just its work on the $650-mil-

lion Brooke Army Medical Center Expansion would normally occupy

the staff of much larger firms. But CNG and its founder, Travis Wiltshire, are not interested in just engineering.

“The more I try to do, the more that I give, the more I get in return,” says Wiltshire. “No matter how much I give out, God seems to return it to me tenfold. So if I have the opportunity to help other folks, I do.”

Wiltshire has long worn locs.“Unfortunately,” he says, “there are not a lot of positive role

models for young people who look like me. I tell kids that if you are not going to be an athlete, you can do something else that is rewarding…. There are many black folks out here doing their own thing, who are running businesses. You do not have to look a certain way to be successful.”

Wiltshire and CNG’s staff have taken active leadership roles in the NAACP San Antonio Youth Council, 100 Black Men of San Antonio, the University of Texas – San Antonio Summer Academy Program and the John Jay High School Science and Engineering Academy. Wiltshire joined with members of the architecture, construction and engineering communities to form the regional ACE Mentor Program, which sends professionals to middle and high schools as speakers, and mentors students interested in STEM careers. CNG sponsors the Youth Institute for Entrepreneurial and Leadership Development (YIELD), which provides young people with training and exposure to the inde-pendent business world through classes and internships.

CNG also sponsors the San Antonio City Wide NSBE Jr. chapter.

Corporate DiverSity LeaDerShipCorporate/eDuCation partnerShipMerck & Co., Inc.

For a global pharmaceutical company, the need for diversity was simple and obvious: Breakthrough innovation requires talented and committed people with diverse perspectives.

For Merck & Co., the best results came from having a diversi-fied work force, from interns to the top execs. It developed a two-pronged approach: reach out to high schools to identify

talent and improve science teaching, and, at the professional level, develop programs and resources to attract mi-nority job applicants and ensure equal treatment through the career ranks.

Twenty years ago, says Carlo Parra-vano, executive director of the Merck Institute for Science Education (MISE), science-rich companies worried the future work force might lack the skills to help discover drugs well into this century. Fewer and fewer students were selecting science as a major or becoming post-docs.

“There was also concern about the quality of science education in our nation’s schools,” he adds.

As far as corporate support, Parravano says, real change would only come from long-term partnerships to alter science education, partnerships based on the needs and resources of the school district and the business community. MISE started with a 10-year commitment to provide technical assistance.

“We moved away from how much money was involved to ask-ing ‘What does the district need? What are their strengths and how can we work together?’ ” Parravano says.

In 1992, Merck hired Parravano, then a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at Purchase, to help local high school teachers improve their classroom work. Parravano staffed MISE with educators to work with high school and middle school teachers.

“Many school teachers are teaching outside of their subject matter,” he says. “Biology teachers are being asked to teach physics, and biology teachers are being asked to teach chemistry. So our initial focus was to work with teachers to build up their content expertise.”

MISE has a staff of 10, but it draws upon more than 1,000 Merck employees to help in curriculum development and class-room support. The institute works with 5,000 teachers in seven school districts. Studies show that over several years, students whose science teachers regularly participated in MISE develop-ment programs outperformed students whose teachers did not.

Pre-college science education is the first half of Merck’s diver-sity mission. The company also works to recruit a diverse work force and help new employees grow professionally.

“We work with NSBE and recruit at Howard, Hampton and North Carolina A&T, as well as other national and local uni-versities,” says Philip Woodrow, executive director of strategy and integration. “But diversity at Merck has many dimensions: ethnicity, gender and race are components…. We also received a diversity award from the Department of Defense for hiring veterans.”

Merck has engineering and technology fellowship programs

Philip T. Woodrow, Executive Director, Strategy & Integration, Merck Manufacturing Division

Travis E. Wiltshire, P.E., President/Owner

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Golden Torch Award Winners


nsbe magazine • convention 2011 • 97www.nsbe.org

at more than 20 universities, geared toward providing intern-ships to minority students. The company also participates in the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering’s scholarship program and the National GEM Consortium.

DistinguisheD engineer of the Year Johnny BarnesGeneral Manager Technology and Chief Technology OfficerIBM Global Business Services – Public Sector

Johnny Barnes started rebuilding car engines with his father at age 13.

“He was an inspiration to me,” Barnes says. “When electronics became big, he found a television on the side of the road in the white community. It was dumped because it didn’t work. He bought a book on televisions and repaired it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was our first color television.”

In 1972, when the newly minted electrical engineer from the University of Houston went to IBM Corporation, he was one of just a handful of people in the company who knew what “magnetic bubbles” were. At a time when computer storage space seemed to depend on the size of the f loppy disc, mag bubbles offered a revolutionary change, prom-ising to replace f loppies and tape drives. Ultimately, the cost of managing magnetic bubbles sank the project, but it launched Barnes on a steadily upward trajectory, testing the bounds of new technology, looking for efficiencies in opera-tions and making management decisions as to what works best for the company and consumers.

In the early 1990s, when IBM lost market share to faster-innovating technology firms and was on the verge of being broken up into smaller companies, Barnes was on the team tasked by CEO Louis Gerstner to help reorganize the firm, streamline its operations and push efficiencies.

“Back then,” says Barnes, “every development lab was au-tonomous, and there was little synergy between the labs and little leveraging of the work going on across the company. I looked at all the tools and developmental processes we had throughout the organization to make us more efficient. In 1995, our product development cycle was two times what our competitors’ was. But we went from worst in class to best in class by 1999.”

Today, Barnes looks for efficiencies nationally, as chief technology officer over IBM’s multibillion-dollar public sec-tor, which includes the government, health and education clients.

entrepreneur of the YearTravis E. Wiltshire, P.E.President/OwnerCNG Engineering, PLLC

Travis Wiltshire’s future was set in fifth grade on the day he wanted to skip his elementary school

music class.“So I wrapped some aluminum foil

around the end of a ruler and stuck it into the electrical socket and tripped

the circuit,” he recalls. “The teacher said, ‘You could have killed yourself.’ I said there is no way I could electrocute myself because wood is not a conductor of electricity, and I was safe. But I still got spanked — by the teacher, by the principal, by my mother and then my father. My mother said I was definitely the engineering type.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Penn State, Wiltshire worked for a New York construction firm for five years. In 1999, he was offered a job in San Antonio with Goetting & Associates, the largest mechanical, electrical and plumbing firm in the city. He worked his way up until he was offered a partnership.

“I woke up in the middle of the night two nights in a row,” Wiltshire says, “and this voice said, ‘This is not what you should do.’ I had two children, this was a really good firm, and they have been good to me. But this voice said, ‘Quit your job, and do something different.’

“And it gave me such a sense of peace. I knew this had to be God talking to me.”

So he quit. Goetting hired his as-yet-unnamed firm on the spot as subcontractor on several projects he had been respon-sible for. The firm, named CNG, has proven to be an attractive minority partner for larger companies seeking government work.

Those partnerships have landed CNG several contracts, including commissions to design the mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems for the $650-million Brooke Army Medi-cal Center Expansion and for San Antonio’s new, $85-million public safety headquarters.

graDuate stuDent of the YearMaziar Rostamian Ph.D. Candidate in Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Idaho

The gas-cooled, graphite-moderated pebble bed reactor is a leading concept for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant, a Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) under consideration in

the U.S. In the proposed reactor, spherical graphite Continued on page 98




pebbles are used as fuel elements, and potential graphite dust generation is caused by several sources.

There are many disadvantages to this dust production at very high tempera-tures in pebble bed reactors. What’s needed is a better understanding of how much dust is produced because of the constant frictional contact among the graphite pebbles. Developing simulated models of the solid mechanics and its interaction with fluid mechanics and

heat transfer is the work of Maziar Rostamian, a doctoral candidate at the University of Idaho. The model to predict this dust is a key input for design safety review, explains Rostamian.

Such intense study combined with adjusting to life in a new country would be enough for most foreign students. But Rostamian, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at Iran’s Mazandaran University, also got interested in NSBE.

“I don’t consider it an organization of only black engineers, but an organization helping black engineers and all minorities to better represent themselves and affect their communities as engineers,” he says.

Rostamian not only joined NSBE but became active and was elected treasurer of the University of Idaho chapter. He has raised funds to support the chapter’s outreach programs and Dynamic Lecture Series.

LIFETIME AChIEvEMENT IN GOvERNMENTCapt. Richard R. BryantSpecial Assistant to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of StaffUnited States Navy

T he unpredictable North Korean government threatens to attack U.S. and South Korean fleets if

they participate in a joint military exercise. Should the exercise proceed

at the risk of war? What is the disposition of Chinese forces, and how will they react?

Questions great and small — from the prospect of war to the number of affordable military bands — flow from the desk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the secretary of defense and the president. Before they go to Joint Chiefs Chair-man Adm. Mike Mullen, they are researched and analyzed by his special assistant, Capt. Richard Bryant, a career officer from the Navy’s nuclear service.

“We do a lot of thought pieces and strategic forecasting here,”

says Bryant. “We support the admiral in making decisions and providing his best military advice to the president.”

As a boy, Bryant watched TV movies and got hooked on the military.

“The images I saw did not reflect too much African-Ameri-can participation in those great battles. But I envisioned…that I could do whatever I wanted,” he says.

Bryant chose the Navy and was appointed to the Naval Academy. He spent his first Academy summer on a three-month submarine tour out of Scotland and liked the undersea life. He became a nuclear engineer and rose through the ranks to become captain of the USS Miami attack submarine, before joining Adm. Mullen at the Pentagon. In February, he returned to the sea as Commodore Bryant, heading Submarine Squadron 3 out of Pearl Harbor.

LIFETIME AChIEvEMENT IN INDuSTRyMilton B. LeeChief Executive OfficerCPS Energy

“I grew up very poor on a 200-acre farm,” recalls Milton Lee. “My mother could pick 150

pounds of cotton a day. But I was a pretty sorry kid in the fields. I was probably seven when my father said,

‘This work don’t agree with you too much. You better go get yourself an education.’ ”

In segregated Travis County, Texas, in the 1950s, that meant being bused to a two-room schoolhouse with kindergarten through sixth grade in one room and grades seven through 12 in the other.

“Ms. Edmondson was a really good math teacher,” says Lee, “and she said I was good with numbers. She said, ‘Keep your head in a book and keep your math skills up.’ I promised I would do that.”

That promise took Lee through the University of Texas with a degree in mechanical engineering and to a job with GE’s power generation division, developing nuclear and gas facilities. He then went back to Texas, as the second engineer to join the new Pub-lic Utility Commission, which would govern construction, tariffs and transmission of electricity throughout the state.

Later, he joined the City of Austin’s utility department, whose portfolio included nuclear, coal and gas, and moved up to be-come chief operating officer. He was then invited by CPS Energy in San Antonio, a municipally owned electric and gas company, to join the firm as senior vice president of electric transmission and distribution systems. In 2002, he took over as CEO. Along the way, Lee has been an active member of the

Continued FRoM page 97





regional NSBE board since 1985 and has actively recruited black engineers.

“I’ve been blessed,” he says, “and God has put me in a posi-tion to assist others: from sponsoring scholarships to recruiting engineers to putting qualified Hispanics and African Americans in top positions within my company.”

MINORITy ENGINEERING PROGRAM DIRECTOR OF ThE yEARFlorence E. BoldridgeDirector of Diversity and Women’s ProgramsUniversity of Kansas

F or the past 27 years, there has been no doubt that minorities and women were welcome in the engi-

neering program at the University of Kansas. Florence Boldridge has made sure of that.

Since taking over the fledgling minority recruiting program in 1983, some 600 minority students have come through the KU College of Engineering as a result of Boldridge’s recruitment ef-forts — which include separate one-week seminars at the univer-sity for high school boys and girls and a Weekend of Engineering for girls — and have stayed to graduate with help from a variety of support and retention programs. Quite an achievement for a music major from a small, segregated, rural Kansas community.

After earning a bachelor’s in music and a master’s in educa-tion, Boldridge spent seven years alternately working and raising children. Then she spied an ad from KU.

“There had been much racial tension at the university,” she says. “There was even a burning of the student union and protests by black students who did not want to be treated as a subgroup but as students who wanted to get an education.”

Boldridge helped establish KU chapters of NSBE, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and the Society of Women Engineers on campus, serving as an adviser to each.

PRE-COLLEGE PROGRAM OF ThE yEARMartinsville and Henry County NSBE Jr. ChapterMartinsville, Va.

In 1997, Helen Howell became very alarmed about the number of African-American students

not graduating from high school in Martinsville, Va. Martinsville was an industrialized community where the goal of many students was to get a job in a factory.

“The school system had a department that trained students for factory jobs,” Howell says. “Most students who did go to college did not venture outside of the state.”

Howell was introduced to the National Society of Black Engineers by her daughter, a graduate of Martinsville High School who learned about NSBE while pursuing a chemical engineering degree at North Carolina A&T State University. Following her daughter’s advice, Howell took seven Martins-ville students to NSBE’s Annual Convention in Kansas City, Mo., in 1998.

“NSBE was very motivating and inspiring. NSBE exposed the students to a new world of science, technology, engineer-ing and math,” Howell says.

After the convention, with help from NSBE’s national headquarters, she organized the first NSBE Jr. chapter in Vir-ginia. The Martinsville and Henry County NSBE Jr. Chapter inducted 32 students in its first year.

Helen J. Howell, Founder and Advisor



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“Our main focus was to motivate students to improve their grade point averages and take more challenging courses,” Howell says. “In the first year alone, grade point averages went from a 2.5 to a 3.2, with the help of retired African-American teachers mentoring and tutoring the students.”

The Martinsville and Henry County NSBE Jr. chapter has grown to 120 stu-dents. Students are on a merit point sys-tem. To attend the Annual Convention, they must earn 600 points through community service, serving in leader-ship roles, keeping their GPA above 3.0 and attending cultural events, camps and workshops. The chapter counsels students in course selection, steering them toward advanced placement pro-grams and governor’s school. In 2005, four students from this chapter were chosen to serve as ambassadors for NSBE in Turkey. The chapter has been awarded more than $100,000 in grants for program development and has re-ceived numerous regional and national awards, including Pre-College Initiative Student of the Year. The chapter has a 100 percent high school graduation rate, and all of its students attend col-lege or join the military.

PRE-COLLEGE INITIATIvE STuDENT OF ThE yEAR (MALE)John P. Robinson Senior, Thomas C. Clark High SchoolSan Antonio, Texas

Engineering came to John Paul Robinson shortly after he entered Thomas C. Clark High School.

“A friend of mine joined NSBE,” says Robinson, “and he said it was really cool and I should try it. Math and science

had always been my favorite subjects in school. With NSBE, there was math, science and building robots.”

Their robotics team would go on to place third in a competition at the NSBE Fall Regional Conference in Dallas.

Robinson has a history of excelling in every activity. After joining the San Antonio City Wide NSBE Jr. Chapter, he went on to become the group’s vice president. His NSBE experiences have led him to pursue an engineering career.

“I like to build things, like robots, cars, airplanes — things that move,” says Robinson. “Chemical engineering is really cool, but mechanical engineer-ing seems to be the basis for all the engineering fields. I want to learn to make cars.”

In school, Robinson carries a 4.0 average in a curriculum including

AP-level physics, calculus, Latin and English, environmental science and lit-erature. He is a member of the National Honor Society. Outside of school, he has been in the Boy Scouts since fifth grade, reaching the rank of Eagle Scout. His community service work — ranging from distributing toys to needy kids to spending time with the elderly in nurs-ing homes — earned him the President’s Volunteer Service Award, the National Jack and Jill of America Volunteer Award, the NAACP’s 2010 Youth Image Award, and the title of Mr. Teen San Antonio.

As for the future?“Our San Antonio chapter of NSBE

has had a member accepted by MIT each year over the last three years,” he says. “I want to be number four.”





PRE-COLLEGE INITIATIvE STuDENT OF ThE yEAR (FEMALE) Rosheena D. Hairston Senior, Carlisle SchoolAxton, Va.

In Rosheena Hairston’s world, the rule was straightforward: If she could touch it, she could build it. “I always liked hands-on projects,”

says the high school senior from Martinsville, Va. “I’m more of a design person. That’s why I am leaning towards material science and engineering management, so I can do all of it.”

Math and science were always her favorite subjects, she says, but engineering got her attention in seventh grade when she participated in an activity created and implemented by the Martinsville and Henry County NSBE Jr. chapter.

“There was a biomedical competition, and we had teams and had to pick a medical condition faced by people in our area. My topic was diabetes, and we put together a project which had a PowerPoint presentation and a display board. It was judged by local doctors, and ours was selected the best overall,” she says.

Since then, Hairston has participated in a Saturday engineer-ing program at Virginia Tech, and she has served over the years as vice president then president of the Martinsville and Henry County group. While active in NSBE, she found time to play on both the basketball and volleyball teams at school, while maintaining a 3.97 average and earning membership in the National Honor Society.

Outside of class, Hairston participates in the Upward Bound Math/Science program, serves on her school’s Student/Faculty Review Board, mentors younger students and volunteers at a nursing home.

OuTSTANDING WOMAN IN TEChNOLOGy Joan R. Robinson-BerryDirector of Strategic Work Placement, Boeing Defense, Space & Security

Joan Robinson-Berry’s gift for math helped carry her through California Polytechnic Institute.

She earned a bachelor’s in manu-facturing engineering and business administration there while on a work-

study program with General Dynamics, and she later added an M.B.A. Robinson-Berry was working on General Dynamics’ MD-80 aircraft program when Boeing bought the company. She was then put in charge of that program and faced the

challenge of shutting it down.After that assignment, Boeing promoted her to its space and

communications satellite division, “where we tried to develop the engineering disciplines, common processes, tool standard-ization for future space technology,” she says. “That’s when I became passionate about strategy.” She then moved to Boe-ing’s corporate offices to work with universities and technical organizations in shaping the strategy for all of Boeing’s future technical development.

That led to her current role as director of supplier diversity and government relations for Boeing’s defense, space and secu-rity divisions. This job allows her to funnel some $5 billion in contracts to small and minority-owned businesses.

“When it came to minority- and women-owned businesses, unfortunately we were focusing on the service field: janitorial services and companies like that,” she says. “We needed more technology companies and small businesses doing innovative research…. My passion and my strategy for The Boeing Com-pany was to develop a strong portfolio of African-American engineering companies.”

Boeing now has a mentoring program involving 31 compa-nies and provides scholarships to executives from minority-owned, women-owned and small businesses to attend manage-ment programs at Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck School of Business. Boeing does more than $1 billion worth of business with minority firms annually.

MIkE ShINN DISTINGuIShED MEMBER OF ThE yEAR (FEMALE)Marlene Willie-Aymone OuayoroMathematics MajorGeorge Mason University

Marlene Willie-Aymone Ouayoro’s family emigrated to Virginia from the French-speaking Ivory

Coast when she was 11 years old. Learning English proved tricky.

“Some words were hard to pronounce,” she recalls, “and I would look at people’s lips and try to mimic what people were saying. And then there were those that sound so much alike. Separating ‘kitchen’ and ‘chicken,’ and ‘going to the beach’ and the other B-word: those are just awful.”

She did well in Fairfax County schools but lamented, “I wished in high school they had pushed the minority students hard, and I wish I had taken more math and calculus.”

As a result, while she was accepted at George Mason Uni-versity, her SAT scores were too low to qualify for financial aid, and her math skills were weak. But in






college, “I worked hard,” she says, “and got an A in pre-calculus and then an A in calculus, too.”

She took off two years to work and earn money and then returned to school to major in math and computer science with the aid of a Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Partici-pation scholarship. She had a 3.95 grade point average, and the Stokes grant was followed by scholarships from Battelle and NSBE.

Ouayoro became active in NSBE, began tutoring in math and computer science and helped Fairfax County high school kids living in homeless shelters or Section 8 housing in an SAT preparation program.

“We are shooting to help them all get scholarships,” she says. She has also raised money to set up a foundation in the war-torn Ivory Coast for education, food, lodging and books for 26 girls who are good in math or physics.

MIkE ShINN DISTINGuIShED MEMBER OF ThE yEAR (MALE)Jacob TzegaegbeCivil Engineering MajorGeorgia Institute of Technology

Jacob Tzegaegbe is the eldest of five children of a Nigerian and Israeli couple who emigrated to

Georgia in 1987. He spent his for-mative years watching his father’s home renovation business.

“I used to work with my father, and I saw how passion-ate he was in building something from scratch,” Tzegaegbe recalls. “I wanted to go into the field where my father was, and I realized — probably in the 10th grade — that engi-neering was the way to go.”

Tzegaegbe went to Georgia Tech for a civil engineering degree. For his first two years, when he wasn’t maintaining his 3.9 grade point average, he was a varsity swimmer and high diver. In his junior year, however, he broke his heel diving and was out of competition.

He could have sulked. But, he says, “I wanted to be useful, and NSBE was doing great things around the campus. So he threw himself into the civic side of Georgia Tech. He joined Alpha Phi Alpha’s community service program, mentor-ing youths in the Atlanta area. With NSBE, he created the Scholarship Sundays program to combat the low retention rate among Georgia Tech’s black freshmen, by encouraging them to make the most of their weekends. The Sunday ses-sions brought nearly half the black freshmen to tutoring and discussion sessions with black juniors and seniors.

Tzegaegbe, the first in his family to go to college, has served as academic excellence chair of the Georgia Tech

NSBE chapter, president of the Alpha Phi Alpha chapter, Georgia Tech senior class president and member of the school’s Diversity Institute and Civil Engineering Student Advisory Councils. A Rhodes Scholar finalist, he hopes one day to work on developing a transportation infrastructure in developing countries, the biggest issue after water, he says.

ALuMNI ExTENSION MEMBER OF ThE yEARTiffani A. TeacheyNSBE Charlotte Alumni Extension ChapterMechanical Engineer, The Shaw Group, Inc.

T iffani Teachey had never heard of NSBE before she arrived at the University of North

Carolina at Charlotte to study mechanical engineering. NSBE became an important part of her life while she was earning her bachelor’s and then a master’s in engineering management.

In fact, she never really left NSBE. Teachey graduated in 2005 with her master’s and worked as a project engineer in the nuclear section of the Electric Power Research Insti-tute, the power industry’s research and development arm. In 2008, she joined The Shaw Group’s nuclear division to work on the development of one of the nation’s first new commercial power reactors in 30 years.

Her job is difficult enough to occupy nearly all of the average engineer’s time. But Teachey is passionate about community service. She has been in the Big Brothers, Big Sisters program for four years, mentoring a 16-year-old girl, and has been active in the Society of Women En-gineers, receiving SWE’s 2008 Distinguished Engineer Service Award for her community work. She is also active in the Boy Scouts of America Engineering Explorers and is a member of the Charlotte Chapter of Women in Nuclear (WIN) and North American Young Generation in Nuclear (NA-YGN).

Teachey is serving her second consecutive term as presi-dent of NSBE’s Charlotte Alumni Extension Chapter, the 2010 National Alumni Chapter of the Year. The group has worked hard to show STEM career opportunities to middle and high school students, by hosting “A Walk for Educa-tion”; a 10-week robotics apprenticeship for middle school students, through the Citizens in Schools program and NSBE Jr.; and an “Engineering is Fun” day, with hands-on design activities.

Golden Torch Award Winners Continued FRoM page 103



ALuMNI ExTENSION TEChNOLOGIST OF ThE yEARCorey L. Kirkendoll Sr.Dallas Metroplex Alumni Extension ChapterDirector of Vertical Solutions, Acadia

A s director of Vertical Solutions for Acadia, Corey Kirkendoll Sr. is responsible for the

development and operations of domestic and international cloud-

computing operations for a variety of sectors, including health care, retail and government. Kirkendoll, an executive with Cisco Systems, Inc. for 14 years, was tapped last May for his position with Acadia, the startup cloud-computing company jointly developed by Cisco, Intel Corporation, VMware and EMX. The expanded responsibility was the logical outcome of his training at St. Augustine College, where he received a bachelor’s in business communication and a double master’s in IT management and conflict resolution management.

“When I speak to young engineers and students, I tell

them, ‘If you have a business background along with an engineering background, that’s the strongest engineer I know,’ ” says Kirkendoll. “ ‘You won’t just come up with a grandiose idea that can never be sold because you didn’t know how to determine a market and what it would take to produce it.’ ”

Kirkendoll has stayed active in NSBE and now is serving on the National Alumni Executive Board as AE Operations and Special Projects chair. “I try to help other minority young people not make the mistakes I did in learning the hard way,” he says. “It’s a chance to let them see African Americans being successful in doing something positive, and doing something other than what they see in their neighborhood.”

Kirkendoll, who has one eye, also teaches young people that having a handicap — physical or economic — is not a bar to success. He chairs Project Still I Rise, which instructs black boys in fourth through eighth grade in science, technology, business and robotics at the University of North Texas. As former Pre-College Initiative chair for NSBE’s Region V, Kirkendoll worked to give youngsters from disadvantaged areas exposure to opportunities in the Texas Technology Corridor. ■

scientists love rainbowsSo do marketers, controllers, shift supervisors … At BASF, we believe that when you invest in the talents of unique and creative individuals, great ideas can blossom. That’s how we’ve built the world’s most successful and responsible chemical company – one person and one colorful personality at a time. At BASF, we create chemistry. www.basf.com/careers

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