Marian Croak
She pioneered Voice over IP — sending voice as internet data — when colleagues insisted it would never work. Every Zoom, WhatsApp and Teams call runs through her work.
Marian Croak joined Bell Labs (later AT&T) in 1982, with a doctorate from the University of Southern California. When the internet began to grow, she and her team made a bet that voice and data didn't need separate networks: voice could be converted into digital packets and sent over the internet itself. Skeptics inside the phone company saw it as a threat to the core business. She kept going.
That work became Voice over Internet Protocol — VoIP — the technology underneath every Zoom meeting, WhatsApp call, Teams standup and internet phone line on Earth. When remote work became the world's default, it ran on her engineering. She holds more than 200 patents.
Croak also invented the text-to-donate system, first used at scale after Hurricane Katrina and then raising $43 million for Haiti earthquake relief in 2010. In 2022 she became one of the first two Black women inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame — alongside ophthalmologist Patricia Bath. She is now a vice president of engineering at Google, leading its Research Center for Responsible AI.
Why You Should Know Them
The pandemic made her invention the default way humanity talks. Billions of calls a day, and the engineer who made them possible — a Black woman who was told it couldn't be done — remains almost unknown.