Presidential Honorary Namings

Mathematician

The late mathematician Charles Bernard Bell, Jr., one of the leading African American mathematicians of the twentieth century, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 20, 1928. At age 19 he graduated from Xavier University in 1947 and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Notre Dame University in 1953. 

From 1951 to 1955, Bell worked as a research engineer at Douglas Aircraft Company. An assistant professor at Xavier University for two years, Bell then spent a year at Stanford University as a research associate.

In 1958, Bell became the second African American professor hired at San Diego State University, a predominantly white campus in that era. He served as an advisor to the nearly all-white student organization Interfaith Council. On leave from SDSU between 1964 and 1966, Bell traveled abroad to the Mathematics Institute of Amsterdam, the University of Madrid (Spain), the University of Vienna (Austria), the Institute of Statistics at the University of Paris (France), the University of Erlangen (Germany), and the Mathematics Conference in Moscow (former USSR).

From 1966 to 1981, Bell taught in succession at Case Western University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Washington at Seattle before returning to SDSU in 1981. He retired as a full professor in 1992. 

Bell published nearly forty papers and was elected a fellow in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistics Association. He enjoyed traveling to meet fellow mathematicians in Africa, India, and Europe and welcomed the opportunity to hone his language skills in foreign countries. 

Bell once told an interviewer: “I enjoy family, I enjoy eating gumbo, and for more than four decades I enjoyed teaching mathematics and statistics and doing research in nonparametric statistics, stochastic processes, and related problems and applications.” Bell’s other areas of expertise are biostatistics and signal detection which had highly sensitive military implications. 

Bell died in Los Angeles on October 26, 2010, at the age of 82.

Former NASA Astronaut

Dr. Ellen Ochoa, a veteran astronaut, was the 11th director of the Johnson Space Center – she was the center’s first Hispanic director and its second female director.  Ochoa’s previous management roles include Deputy Center Director and Director of Flight Crew Operations. 

Ochoa joined NASA in 1988 as a research engineer at Ames Research Center, and she moved to Johnson Space Center in 1990 when she was selected as an astronaut.  She became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on the nine-day STS-56 mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1993. She has flown in space four times, including STS-66, STS-96 and STS-110, logging nearly 1,000 hours in orbit.

As a research engineer at Sandia National Laboratories and NASA Ames Research Center, Ochoa investigated optical systems for performing information processing. She is a co-inventor on three patents and author of several technical papers.

Ochoa has been recognized with NASA's highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award for senior executives in the federal government. She has received many other awards and is especially honored to have six schools named for her. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), serves on several boards, and chairs the Nomination Evaluation Committee for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.  

Born in California, Ochoa earned a bachelor's degree in physics from San Diego State University and a master's degree and doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She is married to Coe Miles, an intellectual property attorney. They have two sons.