Percy A. Pierre
American electrical engineer
Percy Anthony Pierre (born January 3, 1939) is an American electrical engineer and academic administrator specializing in signal processing, stochastic processes, and the statistical analysis of communications systems. He received his doctorate degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1967, and is recognized as the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. His early research on non-Gaussian random processes and signal detection, funded by the Navy for sonar applications, resulted in twelve publications in leading mathematics and engineering journals between 1969 and 1971.
In the 1970s, Pierre was a principal architect of the first national engineering education program for minority students. From 1977 to 1981, he served as assistant secretary of the U.S. Army for research, development, and acquisition, where he oversaw the development of the M1 Abrams tank, MIM-104 Patriot missile system, and AH-64 Apache helicopter. As a university administrator, he was dean of engineering at Howard University, president of Prairie View A&M University, and vice president for research and graduate studies at Michigan State University. He is a graduate and former trustee of Notre Dame University, and is currently Glenn L. Martin Endowed Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland.
Early life and education
Pierre was born on January 3, 1939, to Rosa Villavaso and Percy John Pierre in Welcome, St. James Parish, Louisiana. In 1957, Pierre graduated from St.
“Percy A. Pierre” enters the record as american electrical engineer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Percy, Pierre and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18631740. VIAF identifies the subject as 3715128. The Library of Congress control number is n50009842. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1967, 1969 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Percy A. Pierre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.