Marian Croak

Dr. Marian Rogers Croak is Vice President of Google's Research Center for Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology, which is responsible for ensuring Google ​​develops artificial intelligence responsibly and that it has a positive impact. She holds more than two hundred patents, including more than one hundred in relation to Voice over IP. She is one of only two Black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The other Black inductee being Patricia Bath, who invented laserphaco, a new device and technique to remove cataracts. Dr. Bath passed away on May 30, 2019.

Personal Attributes and Interests

• Dr. Croak is the mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter.
• In 2012 Croak wrote a letter to young women in technology in the Huffington Post. 

Work Experience

In 2017, Dr. Croak joined the Site Reliability Engineering organization to help enhance the performance of Google’s complex, integrated systems.

In 2014, Dr. Croak left AT&T to join Google, where she serves as a Vice President for Engineering. She led Google's service expansion into emerging markets, including managing the team who developed the initial communications technology for Project Loon which uses balloons to extend coverage. She led the deployment of wifi across India's railway system, dealing with extreme weather and high population density.

Dr. Croak has previously served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at AT&T. Before leaving AT&T in 2014, she held the title of Senior Vice President of Applications and Services Infrastructure. In this position, she supervised over 2,000 computer scientists and engineers and managed over 500 programs.

Board and Advisor Roles

She  is a member of the Corporate Advisory Board of the University of Southern California.

Accolades

Dr. Croak has won a number of awards

• Dr. Croak was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, inductee class of 2022. She is credited as a developer of Voice over IP creating most of the methods and features that both improved its reliability and ushered in its nearly universal adoption.
• She was inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame in 2013. She was elected as Vice Chair of ATIS, a technology development organisation.
• She was honoured for “Outstanding Technical Contribution – Industry” at the 28th annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Conference in Washington, D.C. in 2014. 
• In 2014 she was also listed in the Most Influential Women in Wireless list by FierceWireless. 
• She was further honoured at Culture Shifting: A Weekend of Innovation in 2014.
• She was also awarded the 2013 and 2014 Edison Patent Awards.

Philanthropy, Community Service and Memberships

Dr. Croak serves on the board of directors of the Centre for Holocausts, Human Rights & Genocide Education. 

Education

Dr. Croak attended Princeton University and the University of Southern California where she received her doctorate in quantitative analysis.