Black History Month

Ursula Burns was the second child of three children who were all raised by a single mother living in a low income housing projects. Many people told me her she had three strikes against her: She was black. She was a girl. And she was poor.

Ursula Burns's mother operated a home day care center and she also took cleaning and ironing jobs so that she could pay for Ursula to go to Cathedral High School, a Roman Catholic preparatory school. In college, she earned her bachelor's degree in mechincal enginnering in 1980 from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn.  For that same year, she also began to pursue a master's degree in mechincal enginnering at Coloumbia University and she joined Xerox, a company that sells a wide variety of office equipment including scanners, printers, and multifunction system as a mechainical  enginnering intern.

In 2009, Barack Obama selected Ursula Burns to help lead the STEM Education Coalition, which is a national alliance which has over 1,000 technological organization that strive to improve student partcipation and performance.

In July 2009, Ursula Burns became the CEO of Xerox after Mulcahy, making her the first black woman to run a Fortune 500 company 

Ursula Burns was also a membe of the President’s Export Council from 2010 to 2016, a group of labour, business, and government leaders who advise the president on methods to promote the growth of American exports. She chaired the committee in 2015–16.

Ursula Burns was married to Lloyd Bean, who also used to work at Xerox until he died in 2019. The two used to live together Rochester, New York. Ursula Burns also has a daughter who was born in 2019 and is named Melissa and stepson named Malcolm and was born in 1989.