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Yvonne Clark

Yvonne Clark was a pioneer in the areas of engineering and science, was born on April 13, 1929, in Houston, Texas. She was the first African American to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering at Howard University in 1951. She was the first woman to receive a Master’s degree in Engineering from Vanderbilt University in 1972; and, she was the first female faculty at the College of Engineering at Tennessee State University [TSU], endearing her with the title “TSU’s First Lady of Engineering”.

She was the only woman in her graduating class of 300 engineering students and graduated with top honours. When she was 25, she designed electrical equipment with 18 male colleagues. In 1955 she gets married to William F. “Bill” Clark Jr., Clark and was hired as an engineering professor at Tennessee State University in Nashville. She also worked with NASA in Huntsville, Alabama, investigating Saturn V booster engines for hot spots, and then she worked a summer at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, designing containers for moon samples to return to Earth. In the 1990s her research focused on refrigerants. She was 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 was a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering and the American Society of Engineering Education. She received numerous awards throughout her lifetime and worktime, including the Women of Color Technology Award for Educational Leadership by U.S. Black Engineers, the Distinguished Service Award by the Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers, the President’s Distinguished University Award from TSU, and Mechanism of the Year Award given by the TSU student chapter of ASME.