The Corporation of Brown University

Ayanna MacCalla Howard, a member of the Class of 1993, is dean of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University, where she is also a professor in the college’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Additionally, Howard founded Zyrobotics, a non-profit university spinoff that designed AI-powered STEM tools for early childhood education. Prior to joining Ohio State in 2021, she was a professor at Georgia Tech. At Georgia Tech, she served as chair of the School of Interactive Computing and was chair of the robotics Ph.D. program. From 1994 to 2005, Howard worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, joining first as a computer scientist, later becoming a senior robotics researcher and deputy manager of the strategic university research partnership office. Howard earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Brown, a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, and an MBA from Claremont Graduate University. She is a board member of Autodesk and Motorola Solutions. She is also an appointed member on the National Artificial Intelligence Advisory Committee.