It is a universally accepted fact that the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that do, irrespective of their gender or colour.
Wendy Okolo, a 36-year Nigerian woman can best be described as someone who is crazy enough to think she can change the narrative of her world.
Okolo at age 26 became the first black woman on record to obtain a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2015.
The Nigerian-born scientist is currently an aerospace research engineer in the Intelligent Systems Division at NASA.
Okolo was born in 1989 and raised in Nigeria where she attended Saint Mary’s Primary School and Queen’s College in Lagos.
She then received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) in 2010. The Nigerian Amazon later became the first black woman to obtain a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from UTA in 2015.
Besides, she served as president of the Society of Women Engineers at the university and the Special Emphasis Programmes Manager for Women at Ames.
Okolo had this to say about her early school life; “School was easy for me, I got A’s all through, but my mom said I was going to become an engineer even before I knew what it was.
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“I was telling everyone that I wanted to become an engineer, but I didn’t know what engineer I was going to be. I didn’t decide what engineering to specialise in right before I started my first semester but later on, Aerospace was what I fell in love with because it was fascinating.”
Career
Okolo started her career as an undergraduate intern for Lockheed Martin, working on NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Throughout two summers, she interned with the Requirements Management Office in Systems Engineering and the Hatch Mechanisms team in Mechanical Engineering. As a graduate student,
She later worked in the Control Design and Analysis Branch of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Okolo is a sub-project manager in the Intelligent Systems Division of NASA Ames, and a research engineer in the Discovery and Systems Health Technology (DaSH)
Awards
She won the Amelia Earhart Fellowship in and the DoD National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (2012).
Okolo also was awarded the Texas Space Grant Consortium (TSGC) Fellowship in 2012, and 2013 respectively.
Also in 2013, she won the AIAA John Leland Atwood Graduate Award.
In 2019, she was given the NASA Ames Early Career Researcher Award, becoming the first woman to receive the Ames Early Career Researcher Award.
At NASA, she was honoured with the 2021 NASA Exceptional Technology Achievement Medal.
Black Engineer of the Year Award (BEYA) for The Most Promising Engineer in the United States government. In 2021, she was named among the Most Influential People of African Descent, in support of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent. In June 2023, Okolo published her book titled, “LEARN TO FLY: ON BECAMING A ROCKET SCIENTIST”, the book is available on Amazon.
Moreover, Okolo is an avid supporter of changing the narrative of underrepresentation in STEM, particularly for young girls, career women, and people of color.
Her initiatives include creating nursing rooms for mothers to ease their transition back to work and analysing job language usage in position descriptions to remove gendered language biases that reduce female applicants.
Okolo is a popular keynote speaker, always available when called, and she is serving on a panel, inspiring the next generation of minority STEM leaders, and providing tools for individuals and organisations to foster diversity and inclusion in STEM.
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