Mark E. Dean

An American inventor and computer engineer, Dean was one of the scientists responsible for creating the computer technology used in more than 40 million personal computers produced each year. He was the first African-American to become an IBM Fellow (1995)—the highest level of technical excellence at the company. A year later, he was honored with the Black Engineer of the Year President's Award, and in 1997, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In 2001, he was slated to be a member of the National Academy of Engineers.

Born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, in elementary school he excelled in math, taking the same math courses as the older children. He built his first computer, radio, and amplifier while in high school. At Jefferson City High School, Dean excelled in many different areas, standing out as a gifted athlete and graduating with straight A's. He went on to obtain a Bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee, graduating at the top of his class in 1979. He also obtained a Master's degree from Florida Atlantic University in 1982 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University ten years later, all in Electrical Engineering.

He began working for IBM in 1980, where he helped develop a number of landmark technologies, including the color PC monitor and the first gigahertz chip. Dean was part of the team with engineer Dennis Moeller that developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus), which enabled multiple peripherals—such as disk drives, monitors, modems, and printers—to be connected to personal computers. In 1998, he led a team of engineers at IBM's Austin, Texas, lab that produced the 1 GHz chip, a revolutionary piece of technology able to do a billion calculations a second, which contains 1 million transistors and was slated to eventually be applied to microprocessors. The 1 GHz chip's potential is limitless.

He previously served as CTO for IBM Middle East and Africa and prior to that as an IBM Vice President overseeing the company's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. Dean holds more than 20 US patents, including three of IBM's original nine PC patents. His patents include those geared toward allowing people to add new devices to their personal computers—simplifying the way printers, scanners, or graphics are added, or devising technology friendly to vendors who build plug-ins. Many of his patents are in the area of new features such as a set of graphics so that elements such as pictures on the screen are cleaner.

In August 2011, writing in his blog, he stated that he "now uses a tablet computer instead of a PC." Dean served as the John Fisher Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Tennessee. He also taught Computer Science at Harvard.