MITRE Employees Receive 2005 Black Engineer of the Year Awards

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

McLean, Virginia, March 4, 2005 — Three MITRE engineers have been honored with 2005 Black Engineer of the Year Awards for their technical contributions and community service.

The awards were presented February 19 in Baltimore during the 19th annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards Conference. The conference, sponsored by Career Communications Group, Inc., is the nation's largest yearly gathering of black technical professionals.

Dennis Rowe, lead systems engineer, received the Professional Achievement in Industry (Nonprofit) Award. Originally from Philadelphia, Pa., Rowe graduated from the United States Military Academy and became the first African-American graduate of the academy to be commissioned in the U.S. Army as a Second Lieutenant in the field of military intelligence. During his 10 years in the military, he earned the Army Meritorious Service Medal, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Defense Service Medal.

Rowe joined MITRE's Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD) in 1983 and has been integral to several efforts relating to the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) redesign of the national airspace system (NAS). For two years, he provided on-site FAA support as deputy systems engineering manager for En Route Automation. He served another two years as MITRE's liaison to the FAA's Air Traffic Organization and has written or co-written several FAA strategic planning guidance documents. During the past six years, Rowe has led efforts to help the FAA provide increased civilian access to airspace used primarily by the military. He has also been a leader in MITRE's effort to develop and test decision-support tools for improving the efficiency of air traffic control. He has worked with the FAA and NASA since 1999 to develop the Multi-Center Traffic Management Advisor, a tool to improve the flow of arrivals to busy airports. In his MITRE work supporting the military, Rowe served from 1987 to 1992 at MITRE's Brussels, Belgium, location as a U.S. national expert on intelligence systems on behalf of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence.

Since 1996, Rowe has been a leader in Reach for Tomorrow, Inc., which gives underachieving high school students an opportunity to experience the benefits of higher education. On several occasions, he has hosted groups of students at MITRE, arranging for them to experiment with flight simulators and aviation modeling tools and helping them gain opportunities to learn basic concepts in nanotechnology.

Rowe holds both doctoral and master's degrees in computer science from The George Washington University, as well as a master's degree in counseling from Boston University. He and his wife Harriett live in Dale City, Va., and are the parents of four children.

John K. Dixon, senior signal processing engineer, received the GEM Outstanding Alumnus Award. The award is granted to a previous recipient of a scholarship from GEM, the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science. A 1996 graduate of Hampton University, Dixon showed promise early. While still at the university, he designed and developed a campus-wide kiosk used by students and faculty to obtain campus information. He went on to earn master's and doctoral degrees in computer science at Michigan State University, where his studies were partially funded by a GEM grant.

Since joining MITRE in 1996, Dixon has held a series of increasingly responsible positions in our Department of Defense Federally Funded Research and Development Center. As a member of a software development team, he created a variety of Web-based applications for the MITRE intranet. More recently, he developed and researched digital video analysis and image processing applications for several MITRE projects, including a research testbed for analyzing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) video feeds. He currently supports a MITRE research team that is designing, prototyping, and evaluating an information infrastructure to help realize the full potential of human brain-mapping data.

In addition to his educational and career achievements, Dixon also devotes time to his community. He is the founder of the Keys to Life Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the lives of youth and their families through educational opportunities and mentoring. Born in Washington, D.C., he currently lives in Upper Marlboro, Md.

Debra Moch-Mooney, lead simulation modeling engineer, has been named a 2005 Modern-Day Technology Leader. She is one of a group of 101 black professionals honored for "working now to shape the technology and science of the future."

Moch-Mooney was born in Chicago and grew up in Stockton, Calif. She holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Spelman College in Atlanta, and a master's degree in systems engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. In her eight years at MITRE, Moch-Mooney has made several valuable contributions to CAASD. She currently focuses on modeling the NAS, applying her talents for statistical analysis to a variety of challenges. She has developed quantitative performance measures to highlight areas of critical need, which help focus future activities of the NAS redesign program. She also teaches classes in the application of aviation tools to solve operational problems. Prior to joining MITRE, she worked at the Center for Naval Analyses and TASC, Inc., where she supported several Navy programs.

She balances her career with family and community life. She has served as both a math tutor and mentor to students at a local high school and community college and participates actively in a child advocacy organization. Moch-Mooney and her husband live in Falls Church, Va., with their two daughters.

MITRE (www.mitre.org) is a not-for-profit company that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.

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