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After winning election earlier in the year, Eugene DeLoatch ’59 took over as president of the American Society for Engineering Education in June. DeLoatch heads up an organization with 12,000 individual, institutional, and corporate members and 44 engineering divisions.
“Engineering has propelled us to where we are as a nation,” he says. “The challenge is to maintain the number of people who choose the profession. Engineering was very popular at the end of World War II, but young people have so many options today.”
While approximately 65,000 engineers and 15,000 computer science majors graduated in the U.S. last year, about 90,000 workers in those professions were brought into the country to fill positions, he notes. One of DeLoatch’s goals is to tap into underrepresented groups – women make up only 11 percent of the engineering work force, while blacks and Hispanics comprise six percent, he says.
“Part of our agenda is to encourage more young people to see the value of engineering in our lifestyle and commit to the field,” says DeLoatch.
Since 1984, DeLoatch has served as dean of Morgan State University’s School of Engineering in Baltimore, Md., which he established. Previously, he was professor and chairman of the department of electrical engineering at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
DeLoatch is an appointed member and secretary of the Board of Directors of the Maryland Science, Engineering, and Technology Development Corporation. He is a member of ASEE’s Public Policy Committee and the editorial board of its Journal of Engineering Education, and chairs its Projects Board and Peer Review Committee. He has served as ASEE’s vice president for public affairs and was chair of its College Industry Partnership Division.
DeLoatch was cofounder of the Black Engineer of the Year program and chairs the Council of Deans of Engineering-Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He has served on the National Research Council’s Board of Engineering Education and on the Technical Advisory Board of Whirlpool Corp.
Through a cooperative program, DeLoatch earned an electrical engineering degree from Lafayette after receiving a mathematics degree from Tougaloo College.
“Lafayette provided an excellent, focused engineering program that prepared young people to go into the profession with the idea of committing to lifelong learning, although it wasn’t stated that way at the time.” he says. “I found it to be a very solid school in grounding people not only in the fundamentals (of engineering), but also the social sciences and humanities – the building blocks of good citizenship.”
DeLoatch also earned a master’s in electrical engineering and Ph.D. in bioengineering from Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. Lafayette awarded him an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree in 1998.