User:Ogmcgee/Oliver G McGee III

Oliver G. McGee III is a teacher, a researcher, an administrator, and an advisor to government, corporations and philanthropy. He is professor of mechanical engineering and former Vice President for Research and Compliance at Howard University. Authorized by a charter of the 39th U.S. Congress to which President Andrew Johnson affixed his signature on March 2, 1867, Howard University opened its doors to students two months later. As the nation’s largest predominantly black institutions of higher learning, Howard University has produced more black professionals than any other institution in the country. More than half of the nation’s black physicians, dentists, pharmacists, engineers and architects are Howard graduates.

The Vice President for Research and Compliance is the chief research officer of the 140-year organization, and is a Cabinet-level executive reporting to the Howard University President, overseeing all aspects of the management for research and compliance and sponsored programs administration enterprise. Working closely with the provost and health sciences vice president, McGee shaped academic and fiscal research policies, manages the process for the submission of proposals and subsequent administration of grants, contracts and cooperative agreements awarded to Howard University and Howard University Hospital, and represented the University’s research interests to federal, state and local governments, industry, foundation, consortia, and other national and international constituencies. McGee’s primary responsibilities included shaping vision, overall management, and fiscal oversight of all of Howard University’s research strategy, planning, coordination, compliance, administration, and sponsored programmatic operations, including research policy, research administration strategy, human resources, research financial planning, research investments, valuation and risk management, sponsored programmatic operations, research marketing, development and communications, and supervision of research capacity and technical assistance programs. McGee also provided leadership and administrative oversight of the Howard University’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Compliance, Office of Technology Transfer, Office of Research Compliance, and Office of Sponsored Programs. He had fiscal responsibility for central administration oversight of annual university sponsored grants and contracts expenditures of nearly $70 million in FY07.

A former Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), Inc., the UNCF is the nation’s largest, oldest, most successful and comprehensive minority higher education cooperative financial security and assistance philanthropic organization. McGee served as the chief academic officer of the 60-year old College Fund with primary responsibilities of management, oversight, and executive leadership of all UNCF programmatic departments, including establishing within these departments academic policy, business administration strategy, human resources and financial planning, investments, valuation and risk management, operations, and supervision of education capacity and technical assistance programs developed to support the Fund’s 39 private Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) member institutions. He provided leadership and administrative oversight of the UNCF Office of Academic Affairs and to the several UNCF departments: Scholarships and Grants Administration; Corporate Scholars; Fiscal and Strategic Technical Assistance Programs; Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education and Pipeline Development; The Fredrick D. Patterson Research Institute; and the UNCF Institute for Capacity Building - for which he provided Cabinet-level executive leadership in the institute’s launch in 2006. He also had fiscal oversight responsibility for managing an annual UNCF programmatic operating budget of nearly $40 million.

McGee is former Professor (2001-2007) and Chair (2001-2005) of the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering & Geodetic Science (CEEGS) at The Ohio State University – the first African-American to hold a professorship and a departmental chair leadership in the century-and-a-quarter history of the university’s engineering college. The department under his leadership had 44 permanent and active emeritus faculty positions, 43 administrative and 77 auxiliary support staff, and over 450 students. McGee's responsibilities involved administrative management, oversight, and executive leadership of the CEEGS academic department, including academic policy, business administration strategy, human resources, financial planning, investments, valuation and risk management, operations, and marketing, development and communications. He also had fiscal responsibility for managing an annual operating budget of over $5 million, R&D expenditures of nearly $18 million, and an endowment and development fund of nearly $12 million. Broader ranges of his administrative responsibilities included fund-raising, revising curriculum, long-range strategic planning, increasing research efforts, and managing faculty and staff performance review and professional development.

As the former United States (U.S.) Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation for Technology Policy (1999-2001) at the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), appointed by U.S. President William Jefferson Clinton, McGee served as the lead direct report to former U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater, with primary responsibility for management, oversight, and executive coordination of technology policy and programs across the ten modal transportation administrations of the U.S. DOT – totaling to approximately $5 billion annually for research and development of the nation’s complex transportation systems.

At the U.S. DOT, McGee led the interagency team primarily responsible for the development, preparation and coordination of the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) National R&D Plan for Aviation Safety, Security, Efficiency & Environmental Compatibility – the FAA, NASA & DOD joint plan to implement the $1.3B FY01 R&D investment recommendations of former President Clinton’s 1997 Commission on Aviation Safety & Security, chaired by former Vice President Albert Gore. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney E. Slater at the “Aviation in the 21st Century – Beyond Open Skies Ministerial” in Chicago, Illinois launched this plan on December 6, 1999. McGee served as co-chair of the NSTC Committee on Technology Wire Systems Safety Interagency Working Group, which resulted in the White House policy document, Review of Federal Programs for Wire Systems Safety, aimed to benchmark agency efforts to optimize Federal R&D leading to a national strategy for wire system safety in response to the Gore Commission on Aviation Safety & Security. He also led the teams responsible for the development and preparation of the 2025 national transportation policy reports, Transportation Decision Making – Policy Architecture for the 21st Century and The Changing Face of Transportation, both released in January 2001, linking back to the legacy report Transportation Trends and Choices: 1975-2000, released in 1975 by Former U.S. Transportation Secretary William T. Coleman. McGee’s leadership in this effort resulted in his DOT agency-wide teams of federal government career staff receiving the 2000 U.S. Secretary of Transportation’s Partnership for Excellence Award – the second highest award within the U.S. DOT Federal Department. This award recognizes department-wide inter-modal teams/groups that have used partnership models to support one or more DOT strategic plan goals.

McGee came to the U.S. DOT after serving as Senior Policy Analyst (1997-1999) in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Inside the Clinton White House (1997-1999) he had oversight and interagency coordination responsibility for a number of national science and technology policy issues, which included aviation safety and security; aviation science and aeronautical technologies; university-government partnerships; K-12 pre-college science and mathematics education; human resources and workforce development in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology; Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM); and Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He led OSTP’s contribution to the President’s Initiative on Race, which resulted in the White House policy document, Meeting America’s Needs for the Scientific and Technological Challenges of the Twenty-First Century – A White House Roundtable Dialogue for President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.

McGee has also held a number of faculty appointments and research positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Ohio State University, and the University of Arizona. He came to higher education with industrial-sector experience through engineering positions held at NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field and Boeing (formerly McDonnell Douglas) Helicopter Company. He has received numerous national and state teaching and engineering awards including a 1991 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a 1993 NASA Faculty Award for Research, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) & the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's 1995 State of Georgia Professor of the Year, U.S. Black Engineer Magazine's 1996 Black Engineer of the Year Award, Education College-Level, and Science Spectrum Magazine’s “Fifty (50) Most Important Blacks in Research Science” for 2004. In 2005, McGee was named to Science Spectrum Magazine’s “Top Minorities in American Research Science” List. “These “Science Spectrum Trailblazers” represent outstanding Hispanic, Asian American, Native American, and African American professionals in the science arena, whose exemplary work on the job and in the community extends throughout and beyond their industry.” Selected by Science Spectrum’s editors, he was awarded the honor for “his significant, quantifiable, and personal impact on the science industry, while making contributions to his community and maintaining a powerful position of influence regarding public policy for minorities in science.”

He has authored numerous research journal articles on subjects ranging from interdisciplinary design synthesis and vibration control of mechanical and structural systems to aeromechanics and control of dynamic flow instabilities in air-breathing propulsion systems used for aircraft. He has served on the Board of Editors of the international journal, Computer Modeling in Engineering and Sciences. McGee is a former member of the National Science Foundation Advisory Committee for Engineering, and a former member of The Ohio State University’s Alumni Advisory Council (reporting to then-President William E. Kirwan) and its College of Engineering Board of Advisors. He served on the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Body of Knowledge Committee of the Task Committee on Academic Prerequisites for Professional Practice, resulting in the 2004 report, “Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century.” The Faculty of the College of Engineering at The Ohio State University recognized him with its 2000 Distinguished Alumnus Award for “distinguished achievement and eminent contributions to the advancement of the engineering profession and related fields of activity.”

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, McGee earned his first dollar as a hamburger flipper at a neighborhood McDonald’s! As a teenager, he developed a talent as a cellist and earned coveted positions in the Cincinnati Youth Symphony Orchestra and the All-Ohio State Fair Youth Orchestra. He is a graduate of Woodward High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, the oldest public high school west of the Appalachian Mountains. A former Drum Major of The Ohio State University Marching Band in 1980, McGee later in 1981 graduated from The Ohio State University in civil engineering. He received a M.S. degree in civil engineering in 1983, and a Ph.D. degree in engineering mechanics (with a minor in aerospace engineering) in 1988, both from the University of Arizona, and a M.B.A. degree in 2004 from the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business (GSB). McGee also served on the executive gift committee of his M.B.A. class that resulted in the first class in the history of the University of Chicago GSB to attain the goal of 100% participation in substantial gifting to The Chicago GSB Fund.

McGee earned the Certificate of Professional Development (C.P.D.) in 2001 from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and he is an alumnus of Wharton’s Advanced Management Program (AMP36), and the Private Wealth Management (PWM) Program (2006), sponsored by the Wharton School and the Institute of Private Investors (IPI). He has studied advanced engineering technologies at the University of Cambridge (England), Stanford University, and the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Brussels, Belgium. He has also completed numerous professional development programs at the University of Cambridge Selwyn College (Faculty of Laws), The Aspen Institute, Harvard’s Law School and John F. Kennedy School of Government, The White House Senior Leadership Conference III for Presidential Appointees and Nominees (sponsored by the Council for Excellence in Government), the American Association of State Colleges & Universities’ (AASCU) Millennium Leadership Institute Fellows Program, an educational management program for prospective chancellors and presidents, and The Directors’ Consortium, an executive program on the fundamentals of corporate governance and board service (jointly sponsored by the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, Stanford Law School, and The Wharton School). He is also a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).