Mark E. Dean

Biography

Mark Dean, IEEE Fellow (2002), was born in Jefferson City, Tennessee on 2 March 1957.His grandfather was a high school principal and his father was a supervisor at the Tennessee Valley Authority Dam.In high school he was a straight-A student and star athlete, and was one of the few African American students to attend Jefferson City High School. He graduated from the University of Tennessee with a BSEE in 1979, from Florida Atlantic University with a MSEE in 1982.In 1992 he earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

He joined IBM in 1980, where he has held positions of increasing responsibility. Throughout his 20-year career, Mark has held engineering positions in the area of computer system hardware architecture and design. He worked on establishing the strategy, architecture, design, and business plan for proposed video server offerings, and he studied the technology and business opportunity for settop boxes. He was also chief engineer for the development of the IBM PC/AT, ISA systems bus, PS/2 Model 70 & 80, the Color Graphics Adapter, and numerous other subsystems.

In 1995 Dr. Dean was named an IBM Fellow, the first African American to be honored with this distinction. Other honors include: 1988 PC Magazine World Class Award, 1997 Black Engineer of the Year President's Award, the Ronald H. Brown American Innovators Awards, National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997, Distinguished Engineer Award of the National Society of Black Engineers in 1999, and the National Academy of Engineering in 2001. Dr. Dean was named an IEEE Fellow in 2002 for "For contributions to personal computers and computer system architecture, technology, and advanced structures."

He has published papers in the IEEE Computer Society Press, MIT Press, and IBM Technical Disclosures and Publications, holds over 20 awards from academia and industry, and 25 honors from IBM.

Dr. Dean holds more than 30 patents or pending patents.Three of his patents are among the most fundamental for personal computers.He and colleague, Dennis Moeller, developed the interior architecture (ISA systems bus) that enables multiple devices, like modems and printers, to be connected to personal computers.

Currently he is Vice President, Architecture and Design, in the Storage Systems Group. In 1999, he lead a team of engineers that built the first gigahertz (1000 MHz) chip which is capable of doing a billion calculations per second. Dean also holds more than 20 patents.