Our list of influential Black computer scientists is as diverse as the field of study. These leaders in the field of computer science include educators, computer scientists, rock scientists, computer engineers, and more. These innovators are doing groundbreaking work and advancing the field in areas like biotechnology, healthcare, and aeronautics, helping to prepare the next generation of computer scientists.
Computer Science is the study of computers and computational systems, dealing primarily with the theory, design, development and application of software and software systems. Computer scientists research, publish, and teach in areas including artificial intelligence, security, human computer interaction, software engineering, and bioinformatics.
An influential organization in the advancement of Black scholars in the field of computer science, The Institute for African-American Mentoring in Computing Sciences, seeks to increase the number of African-Americans receiving doctoral degrees in computing sciences. Prominent African American scholars in the field are working in areas such as test methodology development (Blanton), performance analysis and modeling of parallel, scientific applications (Taylor), database, data science and informatics, human centered computing, information security, and machine learning (Gilbert).
Methodology
The Black scholars in our list were identified as highly cited and searched people using our machine-powered Influence Ranking algorithm, which produces a numerical score of academic achievements, merits, and citations across Wikipedia, wikidata, Crossref, Semantic Scholar and an ever-growing body of data.
Influence is dynamic, therefore some of the computer scientists listed are contemporary scholars while others may be more historical figures. In either case, according to our AI, these are the most cited and searched Black scholars in computer science over the past 30 years.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
Here are some of the most notable African American computer scientists who have made significant contributions to the field:
Robert M. Bell
Robert Bell is a principal member of the technical staff at AT&T Labs-Research. His research interests are survey research methods and statistical learning methods. He received a PhD in statistics from Stanford University.
Kimberly Bryant (1967 - Present)
Kimberly Bryant is an American electrical engineer who worked in the biotechnology field at Genentech, Novartis Vaccines, Diagnostics, and Merck. In 2011, Bryant founded Black Girls Code, a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing technology and computer programming education to African-American girls. After founding Black Girls Code, Bryant was listed as one of the “25 Most Influential African-Americans In Technology” by Business Insider.
Roy Clay (1929 - Present)
Roy Clay Sr. is an American computer scientist and inventor. He was a founding member of the computer division at Hewlett-Packard, where he led the team that created the HP 2116A. He is the Chief Executive Officer of ROD-L electronics and has been involved with the development of electrical safety equipment.
Roy Clay Sr. is often referred to as the “Godfather of Silicon Valley.” After graduating from Saint Louis University (where he was one of the first Black men to attend), he started working in computer programming. This was back in the ‘50s, when computers took up an entire room. He worked on writing software that demonstrated the spread of radiation after an atomic explosion. In the ‘70s, Clay worked as a computer consultant in Silicon Valley and became a key figure in the development of HP’s computer divisions. He would eventually lead the team that engineered HP’s entrance into the computer market.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
Roy Clay Sr. was one of the first computer software innovators in the 50s. He led the team who launched the software for the first HP computer, the HP 2116A, in 1966.
Mark Dean (1957 - Present)
Mark E. Dean is an American inventor and computer engineer. He developed the ISA bus, and he led a design team for making a one-gigahertz computer processor chip. He holds three of nine PC patents for being the co-creator of the IBM personal computer released in 1981. In 1995, Dean was named the first ever African-American IBM Fellow. He began working at IBM in 1980, where he was an essential leader in developing the personal computer. He holds 3 of IBM's original 9 patents for the PC. Beyond that, he holds a total of 20 patents. Throughout his career he has made significant contributions to IBM’s research and development. More recently, he led the team that produced the 1-Gigahertz chip.
Annie Easley (1933 - 2011)
Annie Easley was an American computer scientist and accomplished mathemetician who made critical contributions to NASA’s rocket systems and energy technologies over her 34-year career. As a black female in America during the 1950s she faced heavy adversity throughout her career and was often underrepresented and disregarded. Despite these barriers Easley demonstrated perserverance and determination to make a name for herself in a line of work dominated by males. She demonstrated exceptional skills in mathematics, data analysis, and code development across projects focused on alternative energy.
Annie J Easley was another Black NASA scientist and important Black leader in tech. When she began her career, she was only one of four Black employees (out of 2,500) at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was the precursor to NASA. She started as a human computer, but when the real machine computers came out, she dove into learning assembly language and FORTRAN. She became a computer programmer, working on a variety of projects. But her most famous work was on the Centaur rocket, a first-of-its-kind rocket that used a unique fuel system. Its legacy still endures today.
Clarence Ellis (1943 - 2014)
Clarence “Skip” Ellis was an American computer scientist, and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. While at the CU-Boulder, he was the director of the Collaboration Technology Research Group and a member of the Institute of Cognitive Science. Ellis was the first Black Person to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and the first Black Person to be elected a Fellow of the ACM . Ellis was a pioneer in Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Groupware. He and his team at Xerox PARC created OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
He joined a team at Xerox, where he developed systems for computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and groupware-think Google Docs or Microsoft Teams. His team created OfficeTalk, one of the first groupware systems.
Clarence Ellis changed the future of computer science when he became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in the field.
A big part of Ellis’s legacy is his involvement in providing teaching opportunities to the youth.
Philip Emeagwali (1954 - Present)
Philip Emeagwali is a computer scientist originally from Nigeria. He won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for price-performance in high-performance computing applications, in an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel mathematical formulation and implementation. He is known for making controversial claims about his achievements that are disputed by the scientific community.
Juan E. Gilbert (1969 - Present)
Juan E. Gilbert is an American computer scientist, researcher, inventor, and educator. An advocate of diversity in the computing sciences, Gilbert’s efforts to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the computing disciplines have been recognized by professional engineering organizations and the United States government.
Roscoe Giles
Roscoe C. Giles, III is an American physicist and computer engineer, the deputy director of Boston University’s Center for Computational Science. He is also a professor of computer and electrical engineering at Boston University College of Engineering, with a joint appointment in physics.
Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924 - 2023)
Evelyn Boyd Granville was the second African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from an American university; she earned it in 1949 from Yale University. She graduated from Smith College in 1945. She performed pioneering work in the field of computing.
In 1949, Evelyn Boyd Granville became the second African-American woman ever to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics (hers was from Yale). After working in D.C. using math to help develop missile fuses, Granville took on a role at IBM in 1956. This launched her career at NASA, since IBM was a contractor to NASA at the time. She was an instrumental part of the Project Mercury missions, designing computer software that helped analyze satellite orbits. She also worked on the Apollo program in 1962 before returning to IBM as a senior mathematician.
Evelyn was the second African American woman in history to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her role was one of the fundamental elements of the computer age. During her work for the National Bureau of Standards, she helped in the development of missile fuses.
Kerrie Holley (1954 - Present)
Kerrie Lamont Holley is an American software architect, author, researcher, consultant, and inventor. He recently joined Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. Previously he was with UnitedHealth Group / Optum, their first Technical Fellow, where he focused on ideating healthcare assets and solutions using IoT, AI, graph database and more. His main focus centered on advancing AI in healthcare with an emphasis on deep learning and natural language processing. Holley is a retired IBM Fellow. Holley served as vice president and CTO at Cisco responsible for their analytics and automation platform.
Charles Lee Isbell, Jr. (1968 - Present)
Charles Lee Isbell Jr. is an American computationalist, researcher, and educator. He is Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before joining the faculty there, he was a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing starting in 2002, and served as John P. Imlay, Jr. Dean of the College from July 2019 to July 2023. His research interests focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly interactive and human-centered AI. He has published over 100 scientific papers.
Mary Jackson (1921 - 2005)
Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics , which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. In 1958, after taking engineering classes, she became NASA’s first black female engineer.
Trachette Jackson (1972 - Present)
Trachette Levon Jackson is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan and is known for work in mathematical oncology. She uses many different approaches, including continuous and discrete mathematical models, numerical simulations, and experiments to study tumor growth and treatment.
Katherine Johnson
The accomplishments of Katherine Johnson were highlighted in the film Hidden Figures, but for those who don’t know, she was a pioneering Black woman in tech. She entered college when she was just 15, and at the time of graduation, her only employment options were teaching or nursing. So she worked as a teacher before she applied for a job at the Langley Research Center (which would later become part of NASA). In 1953, Johnson began working as a “human computer” and calculated the flight path for the first NASA mission to space. Her calculations were essential to the success of many early missions, like Project Mercury and Apollo 11. She also helped confirm the accuracy when machine computers were brought in.
Katherine Johnson was also among the first African American women and “Human Computers” to work as a NASA scientist. As part of her job, she calculated trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths in support of the Project Mercury space flights. Among her most popular projects, we can find those for astronauts Alan Shepard (the first American in space), John Glenn (the first American in orbit), and rendezvous paths for the Apollo Lunar Module and command module on flights to the moon. Over the 33 years of her career, she also worked on the Apollo 13 mission. She earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. The space agency noted her “historical role as one of the first African-American women to work as a NASA scientist”.
In her work as a mathematician at NASA, Katherine Johnson will forever be remembered for her orbital mechanic’s calculations. crewed spaceflights. You may know her from “Hidden Figures,” a book and major motion picture. The Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility at NASA honors her contributions.
Jerry Lawson (1940 - 2011)
Gerald Anderson Lawson was an American electronic engineer. He is known for his work in designing the Fairchild Channel F video game console as well as leading the team that pioneered the commercial video game cartridge. He was thus dubbed the “father of the videogame cartridge” according to Black Enterprise magazine in 1982. He eventually left Fairchild and founded the game company Video-Soft.
Jerry Lawson, “the father of the video game cartridge”, was a visionary of the video game industry. Back then, most systems had their programming build-in, so it couldn’t be changed or removed. Together with his team, Jerry developed a new technology that enabled games to be stored as software on removable ROM cartridges.
Jerry Lawson is responsible for creating the first commercial video game cartridge and for creating the Fairchild Channel F video game system. The Fairchild Channel F gaming system was the first console to use programmable cartridges for video games. In place of built-in games, this system used microprocessors and ROM cartridges to house information.
William A. Massey (1956 - Present)
William Alfred Massey is an American mathematician and operations researcher, the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. He is an expert in queueing theory.
James Mickens
James W. Mickens is an American computer scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research focuses on distributed systems, such as large-scale services and ways to make them more secure. He is critical of machine learning as a boilerplate solution to most outstanding computational problems.
Valerie Taylor (1963 - Present)
Valerie Elaine Taylor is an American computer scientist who is the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. Her research includes topics such as performance analysis, power analysis, and resiliency. She is known for her work on “Prophesy,” described as “a database used to collect and analyze data to predict the performance on different applications on parallel systems.”
Dr. Taylor also serves as the director of the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Library.
Kaya Thomas (1995 - Present)
Kaya Thomas is an American app developer. She is the creator of We Read Too, an iOS app that helps readers discover books for and by people of color. Thomas is a volunteer mentor with Black Girls Code and a Made with Code role model. She has received recognition for her work to improve diversity in the tech industry and was honored in 2015 by Michelle Obama at BET’s Black Girls Rock! award show and was named one of Glamour 2016 College Women of the Year.
John Thompson (1959 - Present)
John Henry Michael “JT” Thompson is the inventor of the Lingo programming language used in Adobe Director and a former Chief Scientist at Macromedia. He is a former professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at the New York University Tisch School of the Arts and instructor at Drexel University. He is committed to teaching and motivating successive scions of tech developers. He is a graduate of MIT and the Art Student League of New York.
John Henry Thompson has used his background in computer science and visual arts to help bridge the early gap between technology and art. He is the inventor of Lingo, a scripting language that renders visuals in computer programs. Many programs that use graphics, animation, sound, and video for interactive simulations still use Lingo to this day.
John Henry Thompson created the programming language Lingo, which was used in Adobe Director (previously Macromedia Director) to help render visuals, such as images and video, in code. Another self-taught coder, Thompson learned as many programming languages as he could in order to invent his own. With Lingo, he developed a programming syntax that was more like spoken language, making it easier for beginners to learn and get started coding. Lingo was also instrumental in the explosion of multimedia and interactive programs on CD-ROMs and on the Internet in the 1990s, as the primary programming language of Adobe Shockwave.
John Brooks Slaughter (1934 - Present)
John Brooks Slaughter is an American electrical engineer and former college president who served as the first African-American director of the National Science Foundation . His work focuses on development of computer algorithms for system optimization and discrete signal processing.
Alicia Nicki Washington
Alicia Nicki Washington is an American computer scientist, author, and professor at Duke University. She is the author of the book Unapologetically Dope. She was the first Black woman to earn a Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2005.
Warren M. Washington (1936 - Present)
Warren Morton Washington is an American atmospheric scientist, a former chair of the National Science Board, and currently a Distinguished Scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Together with Akira Kasahara, they laid the groundwork for scientists trying to understand climate change.
Warren M. Washington is a world-renowned atmospheric science and climate research expert.
Additional Notable Figures
- Dorothy Vaughan: Served as the first Black manager at NASA and advocated for equal pay.
- Brian Blake: A computer scientist and academic leader who has powered equity in STEM programs.
- Joy Boulamwini: Founded the Algorithmic Justice League to combat racial bias in AI.
- Marie Van Brittan Brown: Inventor of the first closed-circuit television security system.
This list is far from exhaustive; if you have a suggestion for someone to add, please contact us.
