Her tenacity led her to become the pioneer behind VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which enabled secure and reliable voice communications over the internet. After Hurricane Katrina, Croak invented technology that allowed people to securely donate to charity via text message.
In 2013, Marian Croak was inducted into Women in Technology International’s hall of fame, a move that recognizes her remarkable achievements in tech. Croak holds over 135 patents, primarily in voice-over Internet protocol (VoIP), some in other areas. She has another 100 patents currently under review.
Today, Marian is an SVP at AT&T, serves as a mentor for women in AT&T labs, and sits on the board for the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Education Center.
Marian Rogers Croak Biography
Marian Rogers Croak is a Vice President of Engineering at Google. She has previously served as Senior Vice President of Research and Development at AT&T. She is credited as a developer of voice over IP, creating most of methods and features that both improved its reliability and ushered in its nearly universal adoption.
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Marian Croak
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in 2017
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| Alma mater | Princeton University University of Southern California |
| Employer | Google AT&T Bell Labs |
| Known for | Voice over IP |
Education and early career
Croak grew up in New York City. She attended Princeton University and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California in 1982, specialising in social psychology and quantitative analysis.
Career
She joined AT&T at Bell Labs in 1982. She advocated for switching from wired phone technology to internet protocol. She holds more than two hundred patents, including more than one hundred in relation to voice over IP. She pioneered the use of phone network services to make it easy for the public to donate to crisis appeals. When AT&T partnered with American Idol to use a text message voting system, 22% of viewers learned to text to take part in the show. She filed the patent for text-based donations to charity in 2005. This capability revolutionised how people can donate money to charitable organisations: for example, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake at least $22 million was pledged in this fashion. She led the Domain 2.0 Architecture and managed more than 2,000 engineers.
In 2012, Croak wrote a letter to young women in technology in the Huffington Post. 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 the same year, she was listed in the Most Influential Women in Wireless list by FierceWireless. She was further honoured at Culture Shifting: A Weekend of Innovation in 2014.
In 2014, she 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 which 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. Since 2017, she has assumed responsibility for reliability engineering for many Google services. She serves on the board of directors of the Centre for Holocausts, Human Rights & Genocide Education. and is a member of the Corporate Advisory Board of the University of Southern California. She is the mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter.
In 2021, it was announced that she would be one of the first two black women (along with Patricia Bath) to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Wikipedia Contributors. 2021, October 1. Marian Croak. Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marian_Croak.
Google Developers (2017-06-16), Women Techmakers Mountain View Summit 2017: Keynote, retrieved 2021-10-22
https://www.facebook.com/nyongesande. 2020, September 21. Black African inventions that changed the world yet no one talks about them – Nyongesa Sande. Nyongesa Sande. https://www.nyongesasande.com/black-african-inventions-that-changed-the-world-yet-no-one-talks-about-them/.
