2005 Honors Banquet Featured Noted Speakers and Awards
Dean Way Kuo and Dr. Mark Dean
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. -- The University of Tennessee College of Engineering's Honors Banquet was held on Tuesday, April 12, 2005 at the University Center Ballroom on the UT campus.
The event, sponsored by Eastman Chemical Company, takes place annually to recognize outstanding faculty, staff, students and alumni.
The college's most prestigious recognition, the Nathan W. Dougherty Award, was presented to COE alumnus Dr. Mark Dean. Dean is currently Vice President at IBM and is the lab director of IBM's Almaden ResearchCenter in San Jose, California. At the facility, he 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.
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.
In 1997, Dean was named to be both director of the Austin Research Laboratory and director of Advanced Technology Development for the IBM Enterprise Server Group. His achievements included testing of the first gigahertz CMOS microprocessor, design of a high-speed DRAM and development of the "cellular" server architecture, which is optimized for managing, storing, searching, distributing and mining complex data (such as video, audio and high-resolution images).
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."
Dean received his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the UT College of Engineering 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.
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. During his tenure, the COE launched its doctoral program and began many of the relationships which still exist today in the form of cooperative research between UT and other entities.
For more information, contact: Kim Cowart, Communications Manager, Office of Engineering Communications at (865)-974-0686/kcowart@utk.edu