Marian Croak

Croak grew up in New York City.[1] She attended Princeton University and completed her doctoral studies at the University of Southern California in 1982, specialising in social psychology and quantitative analysis.[2][3]

She joined AT&T at Bell Labs in 1982.[4] She advocated for switching from wired phone technology to internet protocol.[2][5][6] She holds more than two hundred patents, including more than one hundred in relation to Voice over IP.[7] She pioneered the use of phone network services to make it easy for the public to donate to crisis appeals.[6][8] When AT&T partnered with American Idol to use a text message voting system, 22% of viewers learned to text to take part in the show.[9][10] She filed the patent for text-based donations to charity in 2005.[9] This capability revolutionised how people can donate money to charitable organisations:[11] for example, after the 2010 Haiti earthquake at least $22 million was pledged in this fashion.[12] She led the Domain 2.0 Architecture and managed more than 2,000 engineers.[13][14]

In 2012 Croak wrote a letter to young women in technology in the Huffington Post.[15] She was inducted into the Women in Technology Hall of Fame in 2013.[16][17] She was elected as Vice Chair of ATIS, a technology development organisation.[18] She was honoured for “Outstanding Technical Contribution – Industry” at the 28th annual Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Conference in Washington, D.C. in 2014.[19][20] In the same year she was listed in the Most Influential Women in Wireless list by FierceWireless. She was further honoured at Culture Shifting: A Weekend of Innovation in 2014.[21]

In 2014 she left AT&T to join Google, where she serves as a Vice President for Engineering.[2][22] She led Google's service expansion into emerging markets, including managing the team who developed the initial communications technology for Project Loon which uses balloons to extend coverage.[23] She led the deployment of wifi across India's railway system, dealing with extreme weather and high population density.[24] Since 2017, she has assumed responsibility for reliability engineering for many Google services. She serves on the board of directors of the Centre for Holocausts, Human Rights & Genocide Education.[25] and is a member of the Corporate Advisory Board of the University of Southern California. She is the mother of three adult children, two sons and a daughter.