One of the great inventors of our time is an African-American from Jefferson City, Tennessee: Dr. Mark Dean. The IBM fellow and vice president, Technical Strategy and Worldwide Operations is responsible for setting the direction of IBM’s overall research strategy across eight worldwide labs and leading global operations and information systems teams. Dean has about 40 patents or patents pending for his work.
While an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Dean worked at ALCOA as a co-op student in the Minority Engineering Scholarship Program. While there, he supported the design, installation, and startup of a large-scale furnace and mill control systems and also developed a plant lighting system. After graduating in 1979, Dean began working with personal computers as a chief engineer at IBM in Boca Raton, Florida. As a result of his work, Dean holds three of the original nine patents on the standard IBM personal desktop computer that served as a basis for all personal computers. Dean went on to obtain a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
Dean was the chief engineer for the development of the IBM PC/AT, ISA systems bus, PS/2 Model 70 and 80, the Color Graphics Adapter and numerous other subsystems in the original IBM PC. In 1997, he was named director of the Austin Research Laboratory and director of Advanced Technology Development for the IBM Enterprise Server Group. While there he managed the team that developed the world’s first 1GHz CMOS microprocessor, leading to the processor in the Sony Playstation 3.
Three years later, Dean became vice president for Systems Research at IBM’s Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and held several other positions until he was appointed vice president of the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, and senior location executive for Silicon Valley, overseeing more than 400 scientists and engineers conducting exploratory and applied research in nanotechnology, materials science for storage systems, data management, and Web technologies until his current appointment.
In 2000, U.S. News and World Report named Dean one of the “Innovators of the 21st Century.” His invention of the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA), which permits add-on devices such as keyboards, disk drives, and printers to a motherboard, earned him election to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997. He was the third African-American to receive this honor. Dean has a host of other awards and honors.
