Christine Darden

Christine Darden ‘93EE (born 1942) is a mathematician, data analyst, and aeronautical engineer. Through the 1960s, she participated in protests and sit-ins with her Black peers during the Civil Rights Movement. Darden was the first African-American woman at NASA's Langley Research Center to be promoted into the Senior Executive Service, the top rank in the federal civil service. As a member of the Sonic Boom Team (a subsidiary of NASA’s High Speed Research Program), Darden and her colleagues worked to decrease the negative effects of sonic booms (i.e., sounds associated with shock waves created when an object travels faster than the speed of sound), namely noise pollution and the depletion of the ozone layer. Most recently, she served as the Director of NASA’s Office of Strategic Communication and Education. Darden retired in 2007.

Darden holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Hampton University (a historically Black college), a master’s degree in Mathematics from Virginia State University, and a Ph.D. in Engineering from George Washington University. After completing the Executive Education program at Simmons’ Graduate School of Management in 1993, Simmons awarded her the Senior Executive Career Development Fellowship the following year. In 2019, she received a Congressional Gold Medal. Darden is one of the individuals chronicled in Margot Lee Shetterly’s best-selling book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow and Company and HarperCollins, 2016), which the director Theodore Melfi adapted into the film Hidden Figures (2016).

Photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and NASA.