Most Promising Engineer or Scientist in Government

Danyetta G. Fleming
Project Manager for Accreditation
U.S. Army Communications and Electronics Command (CECOM)

By Garland L. Thompson

During the Cold War, it became a truism that America's best technical brains were locked in secure facilities, toiling away on weapons development. With Danyetta Fleming, the Army has proved that sometimes the image fits.
Fleming, a graduate of Chicago's Whitney M. Young magnet school, majored in civil engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A member of the Latin Club and Student Congress and concertmaster of the concert orchestra in high school, she joined Illinois' Student Council and the Illini Symphony as a violinist.

Joining the Intelligence and Information Warfare Directorate of the U.S. Army CECOM upon graduation, in 1997, she helped accredit the GUARDRAIL/Common Sensor 2 intelligence system and supported the project manager for aerial common sensor systems, spending many weeks on bases around the world. In militaryspeak, her job sounds like this:

"Plans and conducts projects pertaining to applied research, design, development, initial acquisition and first fielding of new, modified or improved Electronics Warfare/Reconnaissance Surveillance Target Acquisition (EW/RSTA) technology, equipment and systems. Assignments typically are independent portions of larger projects where most technical objectives are defined and can be achieved using proven theories and established techniques. The equipment and systems pertain to areas of intercept, direction finding, self-protection warning and countermeasures, combat surveillance, target acquisition, identification friend or foe (IFF), signal analysis, jamming, deception, signal intelligence, counter-intelligence, meteorological analysis, nuclear radiation detection and radar detection..."
Got that?

In English, she reviewed network architectures for Army tactical information systems, becoming an expert on network security. Because of her work as an intern, her boss wrote, "the Intelligence community has a better understanding of Information Security."

The systems she works on provide real-time information to field commanders working battle problems, showing were the good guys and bad guys are, and identifying the weapons deployed. Her particular contributions make sure that data stay in friendly hands. 

She's won awards including the Army Achievement Medal for Civilian Service and the Distinguished Young AFCEAN Award from the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEAN). Not bad, for a beginner.

Now, if we tell you any more, she'd have to kill ya....

Garland L. Thompson is assistant managing editor of The Philadelphia Tribune and a member of the Black Engineer of the Year Awards Selection Panel. He can be reached at GThompson@ccgmag.com.