Woman of Power Alicia Boler Davis named Black Engineer of the Year

Along 40 other honorees, General Motor’s Alicia Boler Davis, will be celebrated as the Black Engineer of the Year next weekend by US Black Engineer (USBE) magazine at its annual BEYA STEM Conference in Washington, DC.

The award will make Boler-Davis the sixth woman recipient of the award in the scientific and technical magazine’s 32- year history.

Her historic rise through the ranks at GM has been well chronicled and celebrated since she joined the company in 1994- serving in various engineering and manufacturing leadership positions.

She had been with the company for a couple years when she became fascinated by assembly plant’s complexity and challenges, Davis  told The Detroit Free Press.

“No one said ‘We don’t have women running our manufacturing plant,’ even though at the time, we didn’t,” she said. “I said, ‘You know what? I think I want to run this place. At the time, it wasn’t like I saw women doing it. I just felt like it could happen.”

She said she mentioned it to her manager at the time, he made some phone calls and the rest was history.

History was what she made when she became the first African American female plant manager in 2007. She went on to serve as GM’s vehicle line director and vehicle chief engineer for small cars, and plant manager for Lansing’s Consolidated Operations and Arling ton Assembly. Her efforts helped the automotive giant earn top spot among major automakers with the best quality, according to J.D. Power and Associates 2013 Initial Quality Study, which measures quality problems reported during the first 90 days of ownership.

” I was the first African American woman to run GM assembly plant, and it was no big deal. It didn’t feel like something odd,” Boler-Davis told The Detroit Free Press.”I’d had the (right) assignments and experiences. I had demonstrated my ability to get things done, work with a team, and work with the union.”

She received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Northwestern University and a master’s in engineering science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

“Throughout my career, I was pushed to try new things—things that I hadn’t done before, and things that I couldn’t have imagined doing,” Davis said when she was honored with the 2016 Corporate Executive of the Year at the 2016 …

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