Marian Croak Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids Marian Croak
Croak in 2017
Born	May 14, 1955
Alma mater	Princeton University University of Southern California
Employer	Google AT&T Bell Labs
Known for	Voice over IP

Dr. Marian Rogers Croak is a famous American engineer. She helped change how we communicate online. Today, she is a Vice President of Engineering at Google.

Dr. Croak is well-known for her invention called Voice Over Internet Protocols (VoIP). This amazing technology lets you make phone calls using the internet. It's like talking to someone far away without a regular phone line. This made long-distance calls easier and faster for everyone.

Before working at Google, Dr. Croak was at AT&T (which used to be Bell Labs). She has created over 200 inventions! Dr. Croak wants to make good, affordable communication available to everyone. In 2022, she joined the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her work with VoIP. She once said that inventors are often just like you. They focus on what they want to change and then make it happen.

Early Life and Learning
Her Career Journey
Her Inventions
Personal Life
Her Impact and What She Left Behind
Images for kids
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Early Life and Learning

Marian Croak was born on May 14, 1955, in New York City. She says her dad sparked her interest in technology. Even though he didn't go to much school, he built her a chemistry set. This started her journey into science.

As a child, Croak loved learning how things worked. She was fascinated by plumbing and electricity. Her career is all about fixing broken systems. She studied at Princeton University and graduated in 1997. Later, she earned a special degree from the University of Southern California. This led her to work at Bell Labs, now known as AT&T, for 30 years.

Her Career Journey

Marian Croak started at Bell Labs in a group that studied how technology could help people. She first worked on digital messaging apps. Her job was to see if different messaging apps could talk to each other. This was a new idea because the internet was just starting in 1983.

Bell Labs wanted to send voice, text, and video over the internet. They didn't want to use old phone lines. At first, they thought about using something called ATM protocol. But Dr. Croak and her team convinced AT&T to use TCP/IP instead. TCP/IP made it standard for computers to send information to each other.

A collectible card from the United States Patent and Trademark Office

Back of the collectible card

While at AT&T, Dr. Croak and her team explored digital communication. She worked on improving Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). This technology turns your voice into digital signals. These signals can then travel easily over the internet. Her work made audio and video calls much better.

During her time at AT&T, she also invented a way for people to donate money using text messages. She created this after Hurricane Katrina. It changed how people give money to charities during disasters. She won the Thomas Edison Patent Award in 2013 for this invention.

She got the idea after seeing how American Idol used text messages for voting in 2003. Her text-to-donate technology was ready in October 2005. After the 2010 Haiti earthquake, people donated over $43 million by text message using her invention.

Before leaving AT&T, she was a Senior Vice President. She managed over 2,000 engineers and computer scientists. They worked on many programs for AT&T's phone and internet services.

In 2014, Dr. Croak joined Google as a Vice President in engineering. At Google, she helps expand what the internet can do worldwide. She also works to bring internet access to more people in developing countries. She started a new team at Google Research. This team focuses on making sure AI (Artificial Intelligence) is developed in an ethical way. Dr. Croak also works on racial justice at Google. She continues to encourage women and young girls to join engineering.

In 2022, Dr. Croak was honored in the National Inventors Hall of Fame. She also joined the National Academy of Engineers and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was one of the first two Black women to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Her Inventions

Dr. Croak has received over 200 patents for her inventions. Almost half of these are about VoIP. Many of her inventions helped create the digital networks we use every day. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022 for her VoIP technology.

Today, VoIP is very important for working from home and online meetings. It's also used for personal calls. VoIP technology keeps getting better.

In 2005, she also received a patent for text-based donations to charity. This invention allows a network to find a charity and send money to it. Then, the phone company adds the donation to the donor's monthly bill.

Personal Life

Dr. Croak won the Edison Patent Awards in 2013 and 2014. She is on the board for the USC Viterbi School of Engineering at her old university. She has also been a board member for other important groups. Marian Croak has three grown children.

Her Impact and What She Left Behind

Dr. Marian Croak's work has had a huge impact on society. The COVID-19 pandemic showed how much we rely on technology. Audio and video calls, made possible by Croak's VoIP invention, were essential. Without them, many businesses would have stopped during lockdowns.

Even now, online meetings are common in schools and workplaces. Hybrid and remote options for learning and work are used more often. Thanks to the internet, distance no longer slows down how much we can do.

New trends are changing VoIP, too. The rise of AI is influencing new VoIP developments. There's also more focus on cybersecurity and making cloud computing sustainable. In her role at Google, Dr. Croak continues to explore how to expand internet abilities. She works to bring internet access to more people around the world.