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Pamela Obiomon got interested in engineering as a kid when her parents bought their family a set of encyclopedias for children.
“And we wore those encyclopedias out,” she said. “That’s because I was always a hands-on person.”
When she was in fourth grade, her older brother was an engineering major at Prairie View A&M University.
“And I loved the way that he would study all the time, and he would be up all night, and he was working with a slide rule and a calculator,” she said. “And I was just impressed with that, and so I wanted to be an engineer just like him.”
Well, now she’s done much more than that. Not only is she an engineer, but also Dr. Obiomon is the first woman dean at Prairie View’s College of Engineering, a position she’s held since September 2018. She’s also worked in the biomedical field and worked on flight software used by NASA. And she’s been pursuing "smart city" technology in her leadership role at Prairie View.
Obiomon says there are still many challenges to be addressed in a field often dominated by men. For one, at conferences she’s often the only woman in the room.
“Being female and also being African American, I was a speaker and they would not know it,” she said. “And so just kind of introducing yourself to the field of people not really thinking you are the person who should be there.”
In the audio above, she talks with Houston Matters producer Joshua Zinn about what attracted her to engineering, about women and minorities finding their place in the field, and about her new role as dean.