Yvonne Clark

Background

Clark was born in 1925 in Houston, Texas and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Her father was a physician/surgeon and her mother was a librarian and journalist.

Education

In 1945 she graduated from high school at age 16 and spent the next two years studying in Boston.

Career

She is the first woman to get a Bachelor"s degree in mechanical engineering at Howard University. She is the first woman to earn a master"s degree in engineering management from Vanderbilt University. She is the first woman to serve as a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Technology at Tennessee State University.

As a child she had a love for building and fixing things.

She took an aeronautics class in high school and joined the school"s Civil Air Patrol. Clark then became the first woman to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from Howard University.

After she graduated in 1951 she found that "the engineering job market wasn"t very receptive to women, particularly women of color". Clark earned her master"s degree in Engineering Management from Vanderbilt University in 1972.

Clark helped to start Tennessee State"s chapter of Pi Tau Sigma, a mechanical engineering society.

She has worked for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Radio Corporation of America, Westinghouse, and Ford. Clark spent many summers at Frankfort Arsenal doing research on recoilless weapons. She also spent a summer working with National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Huntsville, Alabama where she investigated Saturn V engines for hot spots.

She then spent a summer at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston working on containers to return moon samples to Earth.

Clark did further research that discovered methods for revitalizing and modernizing part of the inner city through the Westinghouse"s Defense and Space Center in Baltimore, Maryland. As of the 1990s, her research focuses on refrigerants.

She is the main investigator for the research project "Experimental Evaluation of the Performance of Alternative Refrigerants in Heat Pump Cycles" funded by the Department of Energy"s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Clark is the student division team leader for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded project at TSU called the Center for Automated Space Science.

Achievements

• Member and Executive Committee, Society of Women Engineers (1952 - ) Fellow of the Society of Women Engineers (1984 - ) Distinguished Engineering Educator Award (1998) Member, American Society of Engineering Education Member, Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Membership

There, she was the first female member of the mechanical engineering department, and twice chaired lieutenant