20 Notable Black Americans in Telecom and Technology

As a top honor student at Tennessee State University in the School of Engineering, Jesse Russell became the first Black person to be hired directly from a Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) institution by AT&T Bell Laboratories. In 1973, Russell obtained his Master of Electrical Engineering (MSEE) degree from Stanford University.  Russell has helped to shape the wireless communications industry direction through his leadership and perspectives for standards, technologies as well as new wireless service concepts.  His innovations in wireless communication systems, architectures and technology related to radio access networks, end-user devices and in-building wireless communications systems have fundamentally changed the wireless communications industry. He pioneered the field of digital cellular communications in the 1980s through the use of high-power linear amplification and low bit-rate voice encoding technologies and received a patent in 1992 (US patent #5,084,869) for his work in the area of digital cellular base station design.

Source:  AARegistry.org