Marian Croak

Marian Croak studied psychology and quantitative analysis before moving into engineering, joining AT&T's Bell Labs in the 1980s as one of a small number of Black women working in a technical division of the company at the time. She has said that being underestimated in meetings became something she learned to work around rather than something that stopped her.

Her research focused on a question that seemed niche at the time: whether voice calls, which relied on dedicated telephone circuits, could instead be broken into data packets and sent over the same networks used for internet traffic. Voice-over-internet-protocol technology, which she helped develop and patent extensively through the 1990s and 2000s, became the technical foundation underneath video calling, internet-based phone services and much of the infrastructure that modern communication now depends on. She holds more than 200 patents, an unusually high number even by the standards of a research career at a major lab.

She later moved into disaster-response technology, helping develop text-to-donate systems used to raise emergency relief funds after events including the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In 2014 she joined Google, and now leads its responsible AI and human-centred technology research, overseeing work on how AI systems affect the communities that use them, a role she has described as a natural continuation of a career spent making sure new technology actually reaches the people who need it.