Clark received her diploma in the office of the university president. However, she was not allowed to march with her male classmates. Clark was the only woman in her graduation class of 300 engineering students and she graduated with top honors. Onward from graduationĬlark graduated from high school in 1945 at 16 and spent the next two years studying in Boston before entering Howard University in Washington, D.C. In her 2007 SWE Stor圜orps interview with her daughter, Carol Lawson, Clark discusses her early interest in flying and engineering her experience attending Howard University and later Vanderbilt University her experiences working for Frankford Arsenal Gauge Lab, RCA, NASA, Ford Glass Plant her time teaching at Tennessee State University and her involvement in the Society of Women Engineers. In their 2001 Profiles of SWE Pioneers Oral History Project interview, Clark and Irene Sharpe, also a Howard University engineering graduate, discuss how they became interested in engineering, their experiences in college and in the workplace, overcoming racial and gender discrimination and the challenges of work/life integration. Clark received SWE’s Distinguished Engineering Educator Award in 1998. She served on its executive committee and was elected to its College of Fellows in 1984. – as she was known professionally – integrated the Society of Women Engineers. Clark helped start Tennessee State’s chapter of Pi Tau Sigma, a mechanical engineering society.She made great effort to encourage women to become engineers and reported in 1997 that 25 percent of the students in the mechanical engineering department were female.Ī year following her college graduation from Howard University in 1951, Y.Y. She was featured in an article about women in engineering in the July 1973 issue of Mechanical Engineering magazine.Īffectionately called “TSU’s First Lady of Engineering,” Clark, P.E., taught mechanical engineering for 55 years in the College of Engineering and Technology, where she also served twice as chair of the mechanical engineering department. The entry cites her graduation from Vanderbilt with a master’s of science degree in engineering management in 1972 while holding a faculty position at TSU. Her professional engineering career included positions at Frankford Arsenal, RCA, Ford, Westinghouse and NASA.Ĭlark appears in a chapter-The Women Engineers-in Dillard Jacobs’ book, 10 2 Years: A Story of the First Century of Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, 1875-1975. Yvonne Young ClarkĬlark was born in 1929 in Houston, Texas and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. Yvonne Young Clark, 89, was the first woman to receive a bachelor of science degree in mechanical engineering from Howard University, the first woman to earn a master’s degree in engineering management from the Vanderbilt University School of Engineering, and the first woman to serve as a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Technology at Tennessee State University. Nashville’s own ‘Hidden Figure’ and pioneer for African-American and women engineers dies
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