Dr. Ayanna Howard, a noted roboticist, entrepreneur and educator, was appointed dean of The Ohio State University (OSU)’s College of Engineering last November and is scheduled to begin in her new role this month. As dean, she becomes the first woman to lead the College of Engineering; she also becomes a tenured professor in the Ohio State’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment in Ohio State’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to accepting the position at OSU, Howard was chair of the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she was also founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab. She also worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in various roles including senior robotics researcher. Forbes has named Howard to its “America’s Top 50 Women in Tech” list. Howard has co-authored, with Amandla Stenberg[JR1] , an Audible original book Sex, Race, and Robots: How to Be Human in the Age of AI and articles in publications including Science and Engineering Ethics and Pediatric Physical Therapy. Howard earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Brown University, a master’s degree and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California and an MBA from Claremont Graduate University.
