A 1979 summa cum laude graduate, Dean is a member of the elite Inventors’ Hall of Fame. He received the bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from UT (attending on scholarship through the Minority Engineering Scholarship Program), the master’s degree from Florida Atlantic, and the doctorate from Stanford. He earned three of the original nine IBM personal computer patents and developed the IBM PC AT (Advanced Technology).
The ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus, which permitted add-on devices such as keyboards, disk drives, and printers to connect with a motherboard, earned him election to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997. His team also developed the 1-GHz chip in 1994. He was named an IBM Fellow in 1995, one of only 50 active fellows among IBM’s two hundred thousand employees, and the first African American to receive the honor. Also in 1995 he received the National Society of Black Engineers’ Most Distinguished Engineer Golden Torch Award.
He received the US Department of Commerce’s Ronald H. Brown American Inventor Award, and in 2000 he was named by U.S. News and World Report as one of the innovators of the twenty-first century. He became vice president of IBM and lab director of IBM’s Almaden Research Center. He was involved in developing the concept of cloud computing, and became IBM’s chief technology officer for the Middle East and Africa, a position he accepted following a successful time as vice president overseeing IBM’s Almaden Research Center.
In 2013, after retiring from IBM, he joined the faculty of the UT College of Engineering as a distinguished professor.