James West, co-inventor of the modern-day microphone, will give the keynote address Feb. 9 at a leadership conference sponsored by the Princeton chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers. Mr. West’s talk is free and open to the public, and will be in the Friend Center Auditorium on the campus of Princeton University. His talk will begin at 9:40 a.m.
Mr. West, who holds more than 250 patents, has been awarded a National Medal of Technology and inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. While at Bell Laboratories in the early 1970s, he and other African-American scientists created graduate fellowship programs and undergraduate summer research programs for under-represented minorities. These programs had far-reaching influence and underwrote the Ph.D. educations of nearly 200 minority scientists and engineers in the United States.
Mr. West’s talk is part of a day-long New Jersey spring zone leadership conference hosted by Princeton. Other schools participating in the conference are Rutgers, the Stevens Institute of Technology, the College of New Jersey, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
