Readers of a certain age will remember the frustration of trying to dial in their votes for Kelly Clarkson during the first season of American Idol. The phone lines would become overloaded! Most of us dialing in for Kelly probably didn’t think there were actually people in charge of maintaining working phone lines during each episode—and how this experience would inspire them to innovate. But once you know more about Marian Croak, you’ll understand that she, too, is an “American idol.” Learn all about her in this edition of Pioneers in Tech.
Born in 1955 in New York City, Croak began working at Bell Labs (later AT&T) in 1982 after earning her doctorate in quantitative analysis at the University of Southern California. While at Bell, she focused on digital communications. Her many innovations include Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) technology, which enables phone calls over broadband connections. Her American Idol experience led to the development of text-to-vote technology and then—during Hurricane Katrina—text-to-donate technology. (In 2005, text-to-donate raised $130,000 for hurricane relief; following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, it powered $43 million in donations.)
In 2014, Croak joined the team at Google, where she is vice president of responsible AI and human-centered technologies. Then, in 2022, she became one of only two Black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is a worthy honor for someone with over 200 U.S. patents. Moreover, she was featured in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s collectible cards series.
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This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.