The Mission of the Foundation shall be to encourage and to support students at the undergraduate level in engineering and technical education at American colleges and universities with priority to Hispanic women.
In no order of priority, the emphasis shall be upon:
E. Eugene Carter was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1941, where he attended public schools and graduated from Wichita High School East in 1960. An F. C. Austin Scholar at Northwestern University, Carter earned a BS in 1964 and was awarded a National Defense Education Act Fellowship to Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There, he studied with many engineers and earned both MS and PhD degrees in industrial administration with the help of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Dr. Carter taught finance at Harvard Business School and was a visiting associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, teaching in the Boston area from 1968 to 1977.
While at Harvard, Dr. Carter met his wife, Dr. Rita M. Rodriguez. A Cuban immigrant, Dr. Rodriguez arrived in Miami in 1960 when she was 16 and a high school graduate. She attended the Lindsay-Hopkins Vocational School, studying bookkeeping. She graduated from Puerto Rico Junior College and the University of Puerto Rico, earning a BS in accounting. After she saved enough money to enroll in one semester of economics at New York University, the school saw great promise in her and subsequently financed her through her PhD in international economics. Dr. Rodriguez was the first full-time female professor at Harvard Business School where she taught international economics.
Drs. Carter and Rodriguez were married in 1972. They authored a textbook, International Financial Management, through three editions. The couple moved to Chicago in 1977 where Mr. Carter was head of the finance department at the University of Illinois. In 1978, their daughter, Adela-Marie, was born. She graduated from Skidmore College magna cum laude, with honors in mathematics, and became a graphic designer in New York City. She currently creates and teaches programs in slackline yoga throughout the United States and abroad.
In 1982, the family moved to Washington, D.C. after Dr. Rodriguez was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed by the U.S. Senate as an Independent Director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Affirmed by Presidents George H. W. Bush and William J. Clinton, she held this position for 16 years. She then became a Senior Fellow at the Woodstock Theological Institute at Georgetown University until it closed in 2013. She also serves or has served on various corporate boards, including Ensco, Philips Van Heusen (PVH), Affiliated Managers Group (AMG), and the Private Export Funding Corporations (PEFCO).
Dr. Carter served as associate dean of the College of Business and professor of finance at the University of Maryland, College Park. He also was a private investor in A. G. Edwards and served over 30 years as a public director where he was lead director and chair of the audit committee until the firm was sold in 2007.
Dr. Carter is a distant relative of Robert Carter III (1727-1804) of Virginia. Robert Carter III’s grandfather, Robert “King” Carter, was a colonial Governor of Virginia, and was considered the richest man in North America with 300,000 acres of land. Robert Carter III lost both his father and grandfather when he was four, but continued to be a plantation owner with 78,000 acres at the time of the American Revolution. He was noted for freeing over 500 of his slaves, beginning in 1791, 70 years before the Civil War, the largest manumission by an individual in the United States. His decision, for which wealthy white gentry largely ostracized him, came from considerations of religion and conscience. He retired to Maryland to live with his wife’s family and is buried in an unmarked grave.
E. Eugene Carter, Chair and President, is a graduate of Wichita (KS) High School East, Northwestern University (BS), and Carnegie Mellon University (MS, PhD). He has been a professor of finance at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and at the University of Maryland at College Park, where he retired as Associate Dean. For over thirty years he was a Director of A. G. Edwards, Inc., a national brokerage firm headquartered in St. Louis, retiring as lead director and chair of the audit committee in 2007.
John Aldridge, Vice President, is a graduate of Mountain View High School (Mesa, AZ), the University of Arizona (BS in Optical Engineering), and Boston University (MS in Optical Engineering). He is an engineer on the technical staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, MA.
Jane R. O’Neil, Secretary, is a graduate of Bound Brook (NJ) High School, Barnard College (AB) and Stanford University (MA, PhD). She has been a faculty member in economics and educational administration at Wellesley College, Simmons College, Johnson and Wales University, and adjunct faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She has also been associated with Cardean, Abt Associates, Argosy University, and MindEdge, Inc. Dr. O’Neil developed the Opportunity Award concept.
Richard A. Cohn (deceased), former Secretary, attended Bakersfield (CA) High School, Harvard College (BA) and Stanford University (MA, ABD). He was a professor of finance at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the University of Hartford. He was an active consultant with various state insurance regulators. Among his articles is “Inflation, Rational Valuation, and the Market,” Financial Analysts’ Journal, May, 1979, co-authored with Franco Modigliani, 1985 Nobel Award in Economics recipient.
Bree Beardsley Aldridge, Engineering Program Advisor, is a graduate of University High School (Tucson, AZ), the University of Arizona where she was a Flinn Scholar and Watson Scholar (BS, Computer Engineering; BS, Molecular and Cellular Biology), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (PhD in Biological Engineering). In graduate school, she received a US Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology and Microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at Tufts University School of Engineering. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a recipient of the 2013 NIH Director’s New Innovator Award.
Kelly Levi Sartorius, Program Development Advisor, holds bachelor degrees in journalism and U.S. history from Kansas State and Wichita State universities respectively; a master’s degree in American studies from the University of Maryland; and a PhD in American history from Kansas State University. A former development professional, she is also a historian of higher education. Her book Deans of Women and the Feminist Movement was published in 2014 by Palgrave Macmillan and her dissertation received an award from the student affairs association NASPA and its Center for Women. She also earned an archival fellowship at Smith College, and co-led the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education's Advanced Development for Academic Leaders for almost a decade. She has served as a development officer at Kansas State University, the University of Arkansas, and at Washington University in St. Louis.
Trustees are not compensated and there are no employees of the Foundation.