Cynthia Roberta McIntyre


Dr. Cynthia R. McIntyre is a theoretical physicist and former Senior Vice President at the Council on Competitiveness. Her research focuses on the electronic and optical properties of semiconductor heterostructures. She was the second Black woman to receive a PhD in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Biography

McIntyre was born in 1960 grew up in San Antonio, Texas, the only child of two school teachers. She received her PhD in physics in 1990 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. Her research focus is condensed matter physics, and she completed a dissertation "New models of magnetic interactions for bound magnetic polarons in dilute magnetic semiconductors" advised by Peter A. Wolff. When she was a graduate student, McIntyre co-founded the National Conference of Black Physics Students and organized the first NCBPS conference. For this work, she became one of the first recipients of the MIT's in 1995. She continues to be involved in this organization.
McIntyre then went on to serve as the Commonwealth Professor of Physics at George Mason University.

Career

Awards

  1. 's People to Watch in 2013.
  2. MIT's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award in 1995.