Marian Rogers Croak (born May 14, 1955) is an American engineer known for her voice over IP (VoIP) related inventions. Croak worked for three decades at Bell Labs and AT&T where she filed over 200 patents, and has worked at Google since 2014 as Vice President of Engineering, In 2022, she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her work with VoIP.

In 2014 she joined Google as a vice president in the engineering group. At Google, she is responsible for expanding what the Internet is capable of doing around the world and increasing access to the Internet in the developing World. She created a new center of expertise on Responsible AI focusing on ethical
development of AI within Google Research, and now works on Human Centered AI. Croak also works on encouraging women, young girls, and underserved communities
in engineering.

In 2016, Croak was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. Croak was also inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF), the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. Because of this, she became one of the first two Black women to beinducted to the NIHF, joining the ranks of 48 other female inductees and 30 other Black inductees.

Dr. Valerie Thomas is a physicist, data scientist, inventor, and educational leader. She demonstrated an interest in science and electronics from a young age. Although her father recommended that she should just stick to "girly things", she did not let this discourage her. In high school she learned more about physics and began to answer the question of 'what makes things tick?'. After completing high school, she attended Morgan State College, where she earned a physics degree. She then took a job at NASA helping to lay the foundation for image processing for NASA's Landsat program.

The Landsat program is NASA's longest-running mission dedicated to taking high-quality images of the Earth, to study the impacts of land usage and other human/nature-caused changes on land. She also invented the Illusion Transmitter, a setup of mirrors and cameras that capture an image and transmit it to a different location.