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Top 8 Ethiopian-American scientists

8 August 2022


Ethiopian-American intellects Ethiopian-American intellects

We have seen 10 successful Ethiopian-Americans in the entertainment industry, now in this article we’ll see 8 extremely successful Ethiopian-Americans whose profession is not in the entertainment industry. Get ready to see some amazing individuals on this list. . .

1. Professor Dereje Agonafer – Engineer

Dereje Agonafer is an Ethiopian-American engineer and educator who is a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has also been a member of the National Academy of Inventors since 2018.

Prof. Agonafer got his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering in 1972 from the University of Colorado Boulder. He joined IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) after receiving his Ph.D. from Howard University in 1984. He worked with IBM for 15 years before becoming a tenured Professor at the University of Texas in Arlington. Professor Agonafer's research interests include electronic packaging, heat transmission, and thermal engineering. Agonafer was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 for "contributions to computer-aided electro/thermo/mechanical design and simulation of electronic equipment." He is also a member of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the National Society of Black Engineers, and a lifetime member of the National Society of Black Engineers.

2. Dinaw Mengestu - Novelist, writer



Dinaw Mengestu is an Ethiopian-American author and writer who was born on June 30, 1978. In addition to three novels, he has written about the Darfur crisis for Rolling Stone and the violence in northern Uganda for Jane Magazine, His work has also appeared in Harper's, The Wall Street Journal, and a variety of other magazines. He is the Director of the Written Arts Program at Bard College. The National Book Foundation awarded him a "5 under 35" honoree in 2007. Since the publication of his first book in 2007, he has garnered various literary honors and was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2012. Dinaw Mengestu was born in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Abeba. During a period of political repression known as “the Red Terror”, Dinaw's father, an executive with Ethiopian Airlines, applied for political asylum while on a business trip in Italy in 1978; Dinaw's mother was pregnant at the time. Dinaw, his mother and his sister were reunited with his father in the United States two years later, when he was a toddler. The family relocated to Peoria, Illinois, where Mengistu, the father, worked as a manufacturing employee until rising to management. Dinaw graduated from Fenwick High School in Oak Park, Illinois, after the family relocated to the Chicago region. Dinaw received his B.A. in English from Georgetown University and his MFA in writing from Columbia University in 2005. "The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," Mengestu's first novel, was released in the United States by Penguin Riverhead in March 2007. It narrates the narrative of Sepha Stephanos, who left the fighting of the Ethiopian Revolution and moved to the United States 17 years ago. “How to Read the Air”, Mengestu's second novel, was released in October 2010. After Mengestu was named one of The New Yorker's "20 under 40" writers in 2010, a portion of the novel was excerpted in the July 12, 2010, edition. This novel also received “The Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence” in 2011. The Baton Rouge Area Foundation launched this literary award in 2007. Mengestu's first two novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2014, he was chosen for “The Hay Festival's Africa39 initiative” as one of 39 Sub-Saharan African writers under the age of 40 having the capacity and talent to shape the region's trends.

3. Electron Kebebew –Surgeon



Electron Kebebew, M.D. is an Ethiopian-American surgeon, educator, and scientist from the At Stanford University, Kebebew is the Harry A. Oberhelman Jr. and Mark L. Welton Professor and Chief of General Surgery. Electron is well-known throughout the world for his clinical and research competence in endocrine surgery and oncology.
He was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on February 26, 1968 and due to the violent revolution in Ethiopia he moved to the United States as a toddler in 1979. He received a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles.
He received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and then went on to complete his General Surgery residency and postdoctoral fellowship in cancer research.
Electron has received many awards for his work, from the American Cancer Society, American Association for Cancer Research, and the American Thyroid Association’s Van Meter Award.
He became one of a few African American tenured Senior Investigators at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in 2009. Electron became the first Chief of Endocrine Oncology Surgery Branch, handling $10 million in research each year, under the direction of Harold E. Varmus.
During his time at the NIH, he treated thousands of patients from all over the world with complicated cancer cases. The Endocrine Oncology Surgery Branch has established a global standard for training surgeons to be exceptional researchers. His NIH research laboratory was prolific, generating hundreds of journal articles and developing dozens of outstanding scientists through the surgeon research training fellowship program. In 2018, he became the Chief of General Surgery and the Harry A. Oberhelman, Jr. and Mark L. Welton Professor of Surgery at Stanford University. He oversees the entire General Surgery Division which includes colorectal surgery, minimally invasive and bariatric surgery, trauma/critical care and acute care surgery, surgical oncology (breast, gastrointestinal, hepatopancreatic biliary, and endocrine surgery), and general surgery at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. His research laboratory includes research fellows studying endocrine tumors. Kebebew focuses on translational and clinical research regarding endocrine system tumors. He had produced over 400 scholarly articles, dozens of textbooks and chapters, and a plethora of opinion pieces, reviews, and newsletter items as of 2020. His research focuses on developing effective therapies for fatal, rare, and underserved endocrine cancers, as well as identifying new methods, strategies, and technologies for improving endocrine neoplasm diagnosis and treatment, as well as endocrine cancer prognosis, and developing methods for precision treatment of endocrine tumors.



His published works can be found on PubMed.gov In 2020, Electron became the Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Thyroid and has served on the editorial board and as a reviewer for 54 biomedical journals. Kebebew has received numerous honors for his work, including the Van Meter Award from the American Cancer Society, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, the International Association of Endocrine Surgeons, and the American Thyroid Association.

4. Kitaw Ejigu - Engineer and politician



Kitaw Ejigu, born on February 25, 1948, was an Ethiopian American scientist who worked for NASA for four decades as the chief of spacecraft and satellite systems engineering. Kitaw was born in Bonga, Keffa province, Ethiopia in 25 February 1948 Kitaw and his colleagues invented spaceships and rockets to aid in Planetary Science Research and Exploration. He was also a member of the team that developed the Flight Dynamic Simulator, the Advanced Global Positioning Satellite System, and Aerospace Rocket mechanics. Kitaw attended the Polytechnic College of Ethiopia in Bahir Dar in the department of Mechanical engineering after finishing his primary and secondary school at Bonga, Waka, and Jimma. He graduated as the best student in his class in 1966. Prior to moving to the United States, he worked for Ethiopian Automotive Services and Sales Company as Chief Technical Advisor and Assistant Manager. He was Ethiopia's first aerospace scientist. While working with NASA's other scientist and Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon, Kitaw designed two aeronautical devices that were patented under NASA's new technologies program in 1978. In addition, he and his colleagues designed the Flight Dynamic Simulator and the Advanced Global Positioning Satellite System for Boeing, and he worked as a Space Technology and System Research scientist for this company. Kitaw later worked for Loral Corp and Rockwell International as a scientist and engineer. In the 2000s, he returned to Ethiopia and worked tirelessly to promote technology-based development. Kitaw founded Trans Tech International, a private owned satellite and associated systems engineering firm, as a global technologies service systems. He was also its Chief Executive Officer until his death on January 12, 2006. Kitaw joined Ethiopian Automotive Services and Sales Company in 1967, two years after graduating from Polytechnic College, as Chief Technical Advisor and Assistant Manager. Kitaw was married to Stella Ejigu and had three children. He died on January 13, 2006, after suffering a stroke on January 8, 2006.

5. Jelani Nelson - Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science



Jelani Osei Nelson, born June 28, 1984, is an Ethiopian-American Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2014. Nelson founded AddisCoder, a summer computer science program for Ethiopian high school students in Addis Ababa. Jelani was born to an Ethiopian mother and an African-American father in Los Angeles and then grew up in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. He studied mathematics and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and remained there to complete his doctoral studies in computer science. His doctoral dissertation, Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors, was supervised by Erik Demaine, a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Piotr Indyk, Professor in the Theory of Computation Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After his doctorate, Jelani worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, then Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study. He specializes in sketching and streaming algorithms. Jelani is interested in big data and the development of efficient algorithms. He joined the computer science faculty at Harvard University in 2013 and remained there until 2019 before joining the University of California, Berkeley. Nelson founded the AddisCoder program in 2011 whilst finishing his Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a summer program teaching computer science and algorithms to high schoolers in Ethiopia. The program has trained over 500 alumni, some of which have gone on to study at Harvard, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, Cornell, Princeton, KAIST, and Seoul National University.

6. Professor Sossina M. Haile – Chemist



Sossina M. Haile, born July 28, 1966, is a chemist best recognized for creating the first solid acid fuel cells. She is a Materials Science and Engineering professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Sossina was born in 1966 in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. Her family fled Ethiopia during the mid-'70s coup after soldiers arrested and nearly killed her historian father Getatchew Haile, who was a member of the transitional Ethiopian parliament at the time. Around age 10, the family settled in rural Minnesota where Haile attended Saint John's Preparatory School graduating in 1983. Sossina received - The National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award (1994–99), - Humboldt Fellowship (1992–93), - Fulbright Fellowship (1991–92), and - AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship (1986–92). The Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships supported her research at the Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung [Institute for Solid State Research], Stuttgart, Germany (1991–1993). She earned - The 2001 J.B. Wagner Award of the High-Temperature Materials Division of the Electrochemical Society, - The 2000 Coble Award from the American Ceramic Society, and - The 1997 TMS Robert Lansing Hardy Award. In 2010, Haile was invited to give an "Outstanding Women in Science" Lecture at Indiana University. In 2018, Haile was elected a Fellow of the Materials Research Society. Haile also received the 2021 MRS Communications Lecture Award. She received her Bachelor of Science and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also holds a master's degree in science from the University of California, Berkeley. Her Ph.D. thesis is titled "Synthesis, crystal structure, and ionic conductivity of certain alkali rare earth silicates."

7. Girmay Zahilay – politician



Girmay Hadish Zahilay, born May 6, 1987, is an American politician and lawyer who is a member of the King County Council from District 2 in Seattle, Washington. He was elected in 2019, having defeated longtime incumbent Larry Gossett. Zahilay and his brother were born in Sudan to Ethiopian refugees fleeing a war battle in Tigray. His family came to the United States when he was three years old, settling in the Rainier Valley. While his mother Abie worked double shifts as a nursing assistant, Zahilay shifted between public housing arrangements in many South Seattle districts, including the International District and Skyway. Between migrations to public housing in NewHolly and Rainier Vista, the family temporarily slept at a homeless shelter in downtown Seattle. He graduated from Franklin High School in Seattle and was a research intern at the University of Washington Department of Biology. He majored in biology at Stanford University, where he served as president of the Black Student Union. Zahilay earned a J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as an intern at the Office of the White House Counsel during the Obama administration.

8. Teshome Gabriel - cinema scholar and professor



Teshome H. Gabriel (September 24, 1939 – June 14, 2010) was an Ethiopian-born American film researcher and UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television professor in Los Angeles. Gabriel was regarded as an authority on African and developing-world cinema and film. Vinay Lal, a UCLA colleague, stated that Gabriel was "one of the first scholars to theorize critically about Third World cinema." Gabriel was born on September 24, 1939, in Ticho, Ethiopia. In 1962, he came to the United States. He graduated from the University of Utah with a bachelor's degree in political science in 1967 and a master's degree in educational media in 1969. He went on to UCLA, where he got a master's degree in theater arts in 1976 and a doctorate in film and television studies in 1979. Gabriel began lecturing at UCLA in 1974 and became an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television in 1981. Gabriel's books included Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation in 1982 and Third Cinema: Exploration of Nomadic Aesthetics & Narrative Communities. He co-edited Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, which was published in 1993. Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media and Composite Cultures was edited by him. Gabriel also launched Tuwaf (Light), an Ethiopian periodical of the arts published in Amharic. From 1987 to 1991, he was a member of Tuwaf's editorial board. Teshome Gabriel, 70, died of a heart attack on June 14, 2010, at Kaiser Permanente Panorama City Medical Center in Panorama City, Los Angeles.




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