Gerald "Gerry" Smith

Gerry is the Director of Minority Affairs and Director of the Equity and Inclusion Engineering Program (EIEP) in the College of Engineering. Responsibilities in Minority Affairs are to manage, collaborate, create strategies, and engage with organizations across the UIC campus to enhance processes and programs to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion for the past 12 years. Responsibilities in the EIEP program are to identify, attract, advise and mentor undergraduate and graduate students on their academic performance, measure student success and assist in identifying their future career opportunities for underrepresented students. Gerry’s goal is for his students to successfully complete their challenging course work and achieve their engineering degrees across all the engineering disciplines to become innovators and change the world. Gerry has led the College’s recruitment efforts to grow the enrollments over 150% during his 10- year tenure and earn the distinction of the most diverse engineering program enrollment demographic with a minority student 28% representation.

Gerry has 33+ years of IBM Corporation experience as an executive who led consultants, sales and system engineers and staff personnel during his career, along with 17 years of involvement on the

advisory board with UIC College of Engineering Minority Engineering Program and community organizations prior to coming to UIC. The combination of business, management, technical and academic advisory experiences has provided the College of Engineering’s minority and all students a wide range of mentoring and counseling to achieve their goals to graduate