By Megan Sayles
AFRO Business Writer
msayles@afro.com
For the first time in nearly a decade, the annual Becoming Everything You Are (BEYA) STEM Conference will take place in Baltimore on Feb. 15 to 17.
The multicultural event, put on by Baltimore-based Career Communications Group (CCG), assembles more than 10,000 students with corporate, government and military leaders and industry employers to celebrate excellence and showcase opportunities in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) spaces.
Ken Washington, senior vice president and chief technology and innovation officer for Medtronic, will be honored as BEYA’s Black Engineer of the Year.
“BEYA attracts the most senior level people in government, Corporate America, industry and education. We could never have all come together in this trusted community without BEYA,” said Tyrone Taborn, publisher, chairman and CEO of CCG. “We want to make sure that America maintains its global leadership and ensure that we are encouraging enough people to come into STEM career paths. That means we need to focus on groups of people who are traditionally left out, women, Blacks, Hispanics and indigenous people, and that’s what BEYA does.”
Taborn commended Washington for his efforts to propel the healthcare solutions with artificial intelligence (AI). At Medtronic, Washington’s top priority is to leverage the power of data, AI and robotics to streamline the therapies and medical devices that it provides to patients.
One example is the healthcare technology company’s GI Genius Intelligent Endoscopy Module, which uses AI to support the detection of polyps during colonoscopies.
We want to make sure that America maintains its global leadership and ensure that we are encouraging enough people to come into STEM career paths.
TYRONE TABORN, publisher, chairman and CEO of CCG
“Ken Washington is one of the few Blacks with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering. He’s one of the guys that transformed Ford Motor Company to be the EV leader that is today,” said Taborn. “Now, he’s bringing all of this artificial intelligence to the healthcare industry with Medtronic. This guy is the future.”
A native of Chicago, Washington said he couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t interested in technology. Over his career, he’s held positions at Sandia National Laboratories, Lockheed Martin, Ford Motor Company (Ford) and Amazon, working on various complex engineering technologies. At Lockheed Martin, he led a team responsible for building the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on the James Webb Space Telescope, and at Ford his team prototyped the automaker’s first electric truck, known today as the F-150 Lightning.
Washington has attended the BEYA Stem Conference since 2007.
“I’m honored that I’ve been named the Black Engineer of the Year,” said Washington. “It’s not lost on me that as an African-American executive of a large corporation, I can serve as an inspiration for young Black boys and girls who have an aspiration to go into technology or who didn’t believe they could. It’s such a powerful platform to be able to be a role model to others.”
The BEYA Stem Conference was created by Taborn 38 years ago alongside Eugene Deloach, the founding and emeritus dean of Morgan State University’s Clarence M. Mitchell School of Engineering. The pair deemed it essential to expose young people to career pathways in the STEM industries.
The inaugural conference took place at the historically, Black university and continued to be held in Baltimore for nearly two decades before rotating between Washington D.C. and Philadelphia.
“For over 20 years we were here in Baltimore. We went into rotation and left Baltimore for a while, but now we’re coming back home. It’s important to me as I prepare to turn the conference over to new leadership,” said Taborn. “We bring millions of dollars to the city and a ton of prestige, and I think the BEYA renaissance is coming back home at the right time.”
The 2024 conference is expected to bring more than $20 million in economic impact to the Baltimore area. A steering committee of local changemakers and leaders, including Sen. Ben Cardin, Rev. Alvin C. Hathaway and AFRO publisher Frances ‘Toni’ Draper, are helping to plan BEYA’s Baltimore homecoming.
For those who cannot attend the three-day event in person at the Baltimore Convention Center, BEYA offers a digital twin experience, enabling attendees to tune in virtually on Taborn’s metaverse platform, STEM City USA.
“Pop culture has inundated our young people with negative imagery about underrepresented minorities, and I want us to counteract that with an over-indexing of positive imagery of whom they can be, what they can achieve, and how they can drive innovations into corporations and build new solutions,” said Washington.
Megan Sayles is a Report For America corps member.
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