Tech entrepreneur Dr. Sandra K. Johnson, founder, CEO & CTO of Global Mobile Finance Inc., a fintech startup company based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, will serve as commencement speaker for the Harrisburg University of Science and Technology’s Class of 2019.
Dr. Johnson, who has more than 35 years of computing industry experience, will deliver her remarks to more than 600 graduating students during the commencement ceremony scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. on May 9 at the Forum Auditorium in Harrisburg.
Dr. Johnson’s company, Global Mobile Finance Inc., is developing geeRemit, a relationship-driven global remittance mobile app based on blockchain technology and leveraging mobile money. She is also the CEO of SKJ Visioneering, LLC, a technology consulting company.
“As an entrepreneurial STEM University that has worked hard to recruit an undergraduate student body that is 52 percent female and 55 percent minority, we are honored to have a visionary and tech entrepreneur like Dr. Johnson address the class of 2019,” said Harrisburg University President Dr. Eric Darr. “As one of the first African-American women to earn a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and through her amazing career that followed, Dr. Johnson is a role model for our students, staff, and community.”
Dr. Johnson is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is also an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Engineer.
Her prior roles include Chief Technology Officer, IBM’s Central, East and West Africa business development; Executive and Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Middle East and Africa; CTO, IBM Global Small and Medium Business; the Linux Performance Architect, and manager of the Linux Performance, WebSphere Database Development and Java Server Performance teams within IBM R&D. She was also a Research Staff Member at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Johnson has a high-performance computing background and has conducted research in several computer performance related areas. Dr. Johnson was a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, which consists of the top 1 percent of IBM’s more than 250,000 technical professionals.
She was part of the IBM research design team that created the prototype for Deep Blue, IBM’s world-famous chess machine. Dr. Johnson has received numerous technical and professional awards and is a Master Inventor with 40 issued and pending patents. She has authored and co-authored over 80 publications and is Editor-in-Chief of the book Performance Tuning for Linux Servers. In addition, she has authored Inspirational Nuggets,
Inspirational Nuggets Too, and GREGORY: The Life of a Lupus Warrior. She has an expert certification in Security+ from CompTIA.
Dr. Johnson earned B.S. (summa cum laude), M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, all in electrical engineering, from Southern University, Stanford University, and Rice University, respectively, becoming one of the first African-American women to earn a Ph.D. in this field.
About Harrisburg University
Accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, Harrisburg University is a private non-profit university offering bachelor and graduate degree programs in science, technology, and math fields. For more information on the University’s affordable demand-driven undergraduate and graduate programs, call 717.901.5146 or email, Connect@HarrisburgU.edu.
