Nigerian Lady Okolo is American Celebrated Aerospace Engineer

Segun Atanda/

A Nigerian lady who bagged a PhD at 26 and was recently celebrated as the Most Promising Engineer in the United States government has just won the ‘Black Engineer Award of the Year 2019’.

Thirty-year-old Wendy A. Okolo is the first black woman to become a Ph.D. holder in Aircraft Engineering.

Okolo’s Wikipedia page says she obtained her BSc in Aerospace Engineering at the University Of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas in 2010. She became the first black woman to obtain a PhD in aerospace engineering from the same university in 2015 at the age of 26. Her PhD studies were supervised by Dr. Atilla Dogan.

“During her undergraduate years, she was the president of the Society of Women Engineers at the University.

Career

Wendy Okolo started her career as an intern for Lockheed Martin working on National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) NASA’s Orion spacecraft. She worked first in the Requirements Management Office in Systems Engineering during her first summer internship, then she worked with the Hatch Mechanisms team in Mechanical Engineering.

While she was a graduate student between 2010 and 2012, she worked in the Control Design & Analysis Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Wright Patterson Air Force Base. She is a Sub-Project Manager in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA’s Ames Research Center. She also serves as a research engineer in the Discovery and Systems Health Technology (DaSH).

Personal Life

Okolo says her sisters taught her the sciences with their day-to-day realities. She describes them as her heroes.

Awards

Amelia Earhart Fellowship (2012)

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (2012)

AIAA John Leland Atwood Graduate Award (2013)

BEYA Global Competitiveness Conference award (2019) – The Most Promising Engineer in the United States government.”

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