Roger L. Wood

Roger L. Wood was a computer scientist and the first African-American software developer at both Lockheed and Bell Labs during the Civil Rights Era. He participated in the development of key technologies enabling the field of data science and was among the first to articulate its business value.
Early life
Roger L. Wood was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, the oldest of three children born to Roger D. Wood (1916-1960) and Florene Ready (1925-2014). His paternal great-grandfather was Eddie Wood Sr., an Arkansas businessman at the turn of the 19th century.
Education
Wood attended Scipio Africanus Jones High School, where he showed interest and ability in science. His father had been a student of John Watson Brown, who was President of University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff and protege of educator John Hope, and that experience affected his impressions of science education available to his son in Atlanta. He was sent to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he majored in math and minored in chemistry as a student of Claude "Pop" Dansby and Dr. Henry Cecil McBay. He also studied at the executive education program at INSEAD and graduated with an MBA from Rutgers University.
Career
Upon graduation from Morehouse in 1966 he was hired by Lockheed as its first African-American software developer amidst considerable resistance to the hiring of a Black mathematician.
Subsequently, he joined Bell Labs in 1972, coding in several of the early versions of Unix collectively known as Research Unix. He developed many of the first applications for facilitating interoperability between digital telecom switches on Unix in the C programming language.
After the breakup of AT&T in 1984, he would remain with the main operating company after Bell Labs spun off with Lucent. He would eventually retire as Chief Information Officer of AT&T Europe after 40 years in the telecommunications industry.
Views on data science
In a speech to the Association of Information Technology Professionals conference in 1981, Roger Wood clarified that he saw data fundamental to the competitiveness of any global business, nearly 20 years before Google would commercialize big data.
He traveled 25,000 miles a year throughout the country in the 1980s speaking principally on challenges in capture, curation, sharing, storage, and visualization of massive data sets.
Personal life
Roger Wood was married to Valerie Conley, a descendant of Green Conley, founder of the Christian Methodist Episcopal denomination in Northern Alabama 1870. She is the great-granddaughter of Jonas Conley, founder of Conley CME Chapel in Huntsville, Alabama in 1916. They had two sons, Roger Wood and Julian "Nick" Wood.

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