Mark Dean

Academic Accomplishments: Mark Dean earned his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee in 1979. Then after working at IBM for some time, he obtained a master’s degree in the same field from Florida Atlantic University in 1982. In 1992, he earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford.

Computer Science Accomplishments: After he got his bachelor degree, Mark got a job at IBM as an engineer, and during that time he created the first Industry Standard Architecture System Bus, which allowed additional components (like hardware such as disk drives, printers and monitors) to be connected to a PC. In 1999, he also led a team that created the world’s first gigahertz chip that could process one billion calculations per second. He holds more than 20 patents now, some of which helped lead to the development of the colored PC monitor.