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'Human Factors' Entrepreneur

Glamour magazine selected her for a Women at Their Best award, last November. She was honored with the Women of Color Technology Award for Educational Leadership by USBE & IT, in 1999. She's a tenured teacher of industrial engineering at the University of Central Florida, and she formerly was visiting professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. And as if that's not enough, she is a motivational speaker who travels around the country, sharing her story of determination, faith in God, and diligence to achieve her goals despite financial difficulties, disappointments, and having been a teen mother.

A native of Oklahoma, she received her bachelor's, master's, and Ph.D. degrees in industrial engineering from the University of Oklahoma. She was the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in engineering in the state of Oklahoma. She frequently is invited to lecture at colleges and communities to share her enthusiasm about science and technology. One of her goals is to help young people, particularly minorities and women, understand the excitement and opportunities in pursuing a math, science, or technical career.

Now you can add to this impressive list of credentials the title of president and CEO of her own research and consulting company, Tech Solutions, Inc. http://www.tech-solution.net , an Orlando, Fla., company that provides technical consulting and research services in the areas of human factors, simulation, artificial intelligence, and process improvement to federal agencies and corporations. Some of her work for the U.S. Air Force, for example, involves testing biological warfare defense equipment to make sure personnel will feel comfortable with the equipment and that they can use it properly.

Why add corporate entrepreneur to her list of titles? Dr. McCauley-Bell explains that, as an engineer, she is solution-oriented, but "solutions in academia are often slow to see. As CEO of my own business, I can identify problems, find solutions, and see results more quickly."

Surveying Success

Would you like to know the exact location of every manhole cover in San Francisco? Every fire hydrant in New York City? Want to know the size and part number of every pipe under every manhole? Do you want the information visually without leaving your desk? Do you need to know immediately? GIS will show you.

GIS, short for geographic information systems, is the state-of-the art business of Geotopo, Inc. http://www.geotopo.com , a 100 percent minority-owned mapping, surveying, and construction management company based in Oakland, Calif.

GIS was made possible by the advent of global positioning systems, the satellite technology that can pinpoint the exact location of terrain and buildings on earth. GIS creates a layered map with links to every item on and under the earth. It enables cities such as San Francisco to "tag" every manhole cover and every valve and utility line throughout the city. It accesses files with repair history, part number, and maintenance costs. And it does it all with the click of a mouse.

Karl C. Pierce, vice president of Geotopo, points out that "95 percent of all data is referenced to some location on the ground." GIS provides color-linked maps to those points. Today, GIS is the fastest-growing sector of the company's business, in demand by government agencies and businesses alike.

Both Karl and his brother, company Founder and President Wiley Pierce, have their roots in traditional engineering and construction management. Wiley has been a licensed land surveyor since 1966. Younger brother Karl pursued a career working for such structural engineering giants as Bechtel and Kaiser, before they joined forces in 1990 to form Geotopo, Inc. With the use of technology like GIS, Geotopo, Inc. is changing the way the world looks at maps.

-- Bruce E. Phillips