Ms. Carolyn Kahn was among a trailblazing group of impressive winners in the Outstanding Technical Contribution Award category at the 2019 Women of Color in STEM Conference.

Also on the stage this year was Dr. Jessica J. Marquez, a human systems engineer at NASA Ames Research Center. She was recognized for her contributions in developing tools for people who support human space exploration, including trainers, flight controllers, and astronauts.

Fereshteh Morgan, a Boeing Associate Technical Fellow in the top 4 percent of the 60,000 scientists and engineers at Boeing, has spent 20 years generating cutting-edge software, technical roadmaps, and new processes to cover more than $1 billion worth of innovative products that are orbiting space, flying in the sky, stationed on the ground, and autonomously roaming our oceans.

Virginia Mayo serves as a solution architect for risk-based continuous patch and chief engineer for global security patch management in IBM Global Technology Services.

Manali Sapre, a director of engineering and technology at mortgage lending company Quicken Loans, played a key role in shaping the vision for the first Digital Mortgage and then taking it from concept to working application, which is now used by thousands of clients every day to make their dreams of homeownership a reality.

Dr. Carla Cotwright-Williams, Chief of Data & AI at the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is a senior data scientist with the Department of Defense. She is currently detailed to a Center of Excellence that provides expertise to help the department harness the power of AI.

As a Spectrum Economist at The MITRE Corporation, Ms. Kahn has dedicated much of her career to this resource used by military and civilian stakeholders to power their wireless telecommunications.

Since joining MITRE in 1997, Kahn has made groundbreaking contributions by applying her knowledge of economic principles to radio spectrum challenges.

Some of her contributions include working with the MITRE engineers on a 10-year effort for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). As a result of the team’s technical and economic studies and international outreach, the United States achieved worldwide consensus to gain access to an additional 1.4 gigahertz of high-quality spectrum used for flight testing for safety purposes.

Her work gained recognition and made her a leading authority on the economics of spectrum used by commercial and government organizations. <.p>

Analysis by Kahn and her team also led to the establishment of the Spectrum Efficient National Surveillance Radar (SENSR) program, a cross-agency effort that provides an opportunity to use spectrum efficiently and effectively, develop technology capabilities, and generate billions in economic value.

Kahn works within the Center for Acquisition and Management Science and is recognized as a renowned expert on the economics and policy of the radio spectrum, strictly regulated by national laws.