Christine Darden

Christine Darden in the control room of NASA's Langley Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975

NASA Human Calculators - from left: Christine Darden - Katherine Johnson - Janet Stephens - Katherine Smith - Sharon Stack

Christine Darden , b. Mann (born September 10, 1942 in Monroe (North Carolina) ) is an American mathematician and aerospace engineer. She is the first Langley African American woman to be promoted to Senior Executive Service, the highest rank in the federal civil service.

life and work

Darden was the youngest of five children of insurance agent Noah Horace Sr. and elementary school teacher Desma Chaney Mann. She attended Winchester Avenue High School and then moved to Allen High School, a Methodist boarding school (formerly Allen School for Negro Girls) in Asheville, North Carolina. After graduating from high school in 1958, she received a scholarship to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. In 1962, she earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics and a teaching certificate from the Hampton Institute, now Hampton University . From 1962 to 1963 she was a math teacher at Russell High School in Lawrenceville, Virginia . In 1963 she married Walter L. Darden Jr., a science teacher. From 1964 to 1965 she taught at Norcom High School in Portsmouth. In 1965 she became a research associate at Virginia State College , where she studied aerosol physics, where she earned her master's degree in applied mathematics in 1967 .

She then worked as a data analyst for NASA at the Langley Research Center and was promoted to aerospace engineer in 1973. In 1983 she received her PhD in engineering from George Washington University . In 1989 she was appointed technical director of NASA's Sonic Boom Group of the Vehicle Integration Division of the High-Speed Research Program, where she was responsible for the internal development of the Sonic Boom Research Program. On the Sonic Boom team, she worked on designs to reduce the negative effects of sonic booms such as noise pollution and depletion of the ozone layer . Her team tested new wing and nose designs for supersonic aircraft. She also designed a computer program to simulate sonic booms. The program was canceled by the government in 1998. In an executive summary published by Darden in 1998, the program is described as "Technologies for the development of environmentally friendly, economically viable high-speed civil transport".

In 1994 she became the assistant program manager of the TU-144 experimental program , an element of NASA's high-speed research program. In 1999 she was appointed director of the program management office of the Aerospace Performing Center at Langley Research Center, where she was responsible for Langley research in air traffic management and other aviation programs administered at other NASA centers. In addition, Darden has served as a technical consultant on numerous government and private projects and has authored more than fifty publications in the field of high-lift wing design in the fields of supersonic flow, flap design, boom prediction, and boom minimization.

In 2007, Darden retired from NASA as director of Strategic Communications and Education.

She is one of four women featured in the 2016 book Hidden Figures, which records the lives of African American women at NASA from the 1930s to the 1960s. All four women were honored with the Congress Gold Medal of Honor in 2019 .

Awards (selection)

1985: Dr. AT Weathers Technical Achievement Award, National Technical Association
1987: Candace Award, National Coalition of 100 Black
1988: Black Engineer of the Year Award, US Black Engineer & Technology Magazines.
1989, 1991, 1992: Certificate of Outstanding Performance, Langley Research Center
2018: Presidential Citizenship Award, Hampton University
2018: honorary degree, North Carolina State University
2019: honorary degree, George Washington University
2019: Congressional Gold Medal

literature

Margot Lee Shetterly : Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. HarperCollins, New York 2016, ISBN 978-0-06-236359-6 .

Web links

Commons : Christine Darden - Collection of images, videos and audio files

personal data
SURNAME	Darden, Christine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Husband, Christine (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American mathematician and aerospace engineer
DATE OF BIRTH	September 10, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH	Monroe, North Carolina