A daughter of genocide survivors who became the first woman to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Columbia University — and spent a lifetime opening the profession to the women who followed.
Anna Kazanjian Longobardo was born in 1928 in New York City to Armenian parents who had survived the Armenian Genocide and rebuilt their lives in America. In 1949, she made history as the first woman to earn a mechanical engineering degree from Columbia University — entering a profession where women were almost unheard of, and excelling in it for the next half century.
She built her career at Sperry (later Unisys), rising through an industry dominated by men to senior engineering and management roles, working on advanced aerospace and defense technology, including navigation systems during the space age. Along the way she became a national advocate for women in engineering, mentoring generations of young women into technical careers.
She walked into rooms where no woman had worked before her — and left the door open behind her.
— On a pioneering engineering careerLongobardo's legacy lives in every statistic about women in engineering that has moved since 1949 — and in the Armenian-American story of a genocide survivor family whose daughter helped engineer the American century. She died in 2020, honored by Columbia as one of its trailblazers.
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