Who Is Dr. Mark E. Dean?

On Tuesday, April 12, 2005, history was made at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville's College of Engineering's annual Honors Banquet as Dean Way Kuo presented the prestigious Nathan W. Dougherty Engineering Award for distinguished alumni to its first minority recipient, Dr. Mark Dean.

Dean, currently Vice President at IBM and the lab director of IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, oversees more than 500 scientists and engineers performing exploratory and applied research in various hardware, software and services areas, including nanotechnology, materials science, storage systems, data management, web technologies, workplace practices and user interfaces.

Dean was one of the first UT College of Engineering minority students to receive the Minority Engineering Scholarship, which has since been renamed the Diversity Engineering Scholarship. Dean graduated with his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the UT COE in 1979. He later earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Florida Atlantic University and a doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

In the early 1980s, Dean and a fellow inventor, Dennis Moeller, developed computer architecture that allowed IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers to run high-performance software. He holds three of the original nine patents on the standard IBM personal desktop computer that served as a basis for all personal computers.

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 in the original IBM PC and numerous other subsystems. His invention of the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) "bus" -- which permitted add-on devices such as keyboards, disk drives and printers to connect with a motherboard -- earned him election into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997. Dean was only the third African-American to receive that honor.

Dean was named "Black Engineer of the Year" in 1997 and in 2000. In 1995, Dean was appointed as an IBM Fellow, IBM's highest technical honor. Among Dean's other awards, he has received 13 Invention Achievement Awards and six Corporate Awards. He also was honored with the U.S. Department of Commerce's Ronald H. Brown American Innovator Award.

Overall, Dean holds more than 40 patents. In 2000, U.S. News & World Report named him as one of the "Innovators of the 21st Century."

The Dougherty Award is traditionally given to an individual whose professional engineering practice has advanced the field of engineering and brought honor and distinction to the College of Engineering. The award is named in honor of UT graduate and former COE Dean Nathan Dougherty, who served as dean from 1916 to 1946.

From the University of Tennessee at Knoxville