Sandra Johnson ’88, the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Rice, will hold a fireside chat on campus on Nov. 21.
For 26 years, Johnson worked for IBM, serving as a researcher in computer architecture, technical manager, product development leader, global business development executive and CTO of the company’s Africa region.
Johnson was born in Japan and her three siblings were born in Lake Charles, La., where the family lived. Their father, at age 29, having served for a decade in the U.S. Air Force, was killed by a drunken driver when Johnson was two years old.
Her interest in math and science came early. She spent a summer at an engineering institute at Southern University, a historically black institution in Baton Rouge. That led to a scholarship to attend Southern, where she earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1982.
From Southern she went to Stanford, where she earned her M.S. in electrical engineering in 1984. Johnson was contacted by Fayé Briggs, a Nigerian-born professor then on the electrical engineering faculty at Rice who now is president and CEO of Niminq, Inc, a data center and data analytics company. She enrolled in the doctoral program at Rice and Briggs became her adviser.
From Rice, Johnson went to IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, working as a researcher and research team leader. She was part of the team that developed the prototype for IBM’s Deep Blue chess machine. In 2011, she became IBM’s business development executive for the Middle East and Africa, eventually becoming CTO for Central, East and West Africa. She lived in Nairobi, Kenya, and eventually visited 22 African countries.
Johnson retired from IBM in 2014 and became CEO of SKJ Visioneering, her IT consulting firm which launched the financial services start-up Global Mobile Finance, Inc.
This year she published a memoir, Soft Power for the Journey. Johnson has been issued more than 40 patents and was named an IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Fellow in 2006.
Johnson will speak in McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall, at 6 p.m. on Nov. 21 as part of the Engineers in the C-Suite Speaker Series hosted by the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership.