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Charneta Samms

U.S. Army DEVCOM’s New Chief Technology Officer

On campus in February for the first time in many years, Morgan alumna Charneta Samms said she was amazed at “how much the campus has expanded and grown. It’s beautiful, all these facilities. I have to come back for my own personal tour of everything. There’s just so much more I haven’t seen.”

Samms’ return to her alma mater was also cause for Morgan to celebrate: the MSU industrial engineering graduate — Bachelor of Science, 1996 — had recently been appointed chief technology officer of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM), the Army’s largest technology developer. As the command’s first-ever permanent CTO, Samms serves as chief integrator of its multibillion-dollar research and technology mission. She came to Morgan in February as part of the high-level group accompanying U.S. Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth, who made an all-day visit to MSU to review the University’s research capabilities and potential and get firsthand experience with Morgan’s U.S. Army ROTC program, the Bear Battalion.

“The education I received from Morgan State University was instrumental in developing the analytical mindset that has been key to all my career successes,” says Samms, who went on to earn a Master of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. “My MSU professors encouraged me to question and analyze information, which fueled the ferocious fire of curiosity that drives me every day.”

Samms’ path to Morgan began in her hometown of Poughkeepsie, New York, where she lived until her family moved to Newport

“The education I received from Morgan State University was instrumental in developing the analytical mindset that has been key to all my career successes.”

— Charneta Samms, MSU Class of 1996

News, Virginia, when she was in her early teens. Like many future engineers, she loved taking things apart and putting them back together when she was a child. Neither of her hardworking parents, nor her hardworking stepfather, were college graduates, but as her time as a stellar high school student was ending, Samms received career advice from a maternal uncle who worked for IBM.

“When it was time to start thinking about (college), he pushed me toward chemical engineering,” she recalls. “…It wasn’t really as interesting to me, but engineering itself sounded very interesting. So I decided to pursue that.”

Morgan quickly rose to the top of her list of prospective universities.

“I was excited about the opportunity to be amongst people of color, because my entire educational career I was always a minority,” Samms recalls. “…My choices were Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University or Morgan State. And then Morgan State gave me a full scholarship based on my GPA, so that definitely helped with the decision. But as soon as I hit campus and saw all the activities and the opportunity to be the majority instead of the minority, that sealed the deal.”

“I loved my time at Morgan,” Samms says. “It was the camaraderie, being amongst people who looked like me and understood kind of what I was going through. I think it was a really good setting to build up my confidence in my abilities. I also had some really great professors in industrial engineering. Clarence Fry was actually one of the professors who inspired me to work at the Army Research Laboratory,” where she was employed for more than 24 years, rising to the position of chief of plans and programs before her recent promotion.

Samms says she maintains close ties to alma mater, through friends and faculty she met as an undergraduate at MSU.

“Morgan’s definitely home,” she says. n