E. Eugene Carter

E. Eugene Carter is president and founder of the E. Eugene Carter Foundation based in Washington, D.C. The Foundation provides scholarships for women in engineering and other fields, as well as providing philanthropic support to a variety of organizations. Dr. Carter’s vision for women to pursue technical fields derives from his belief that women bring a unique and substantially valuable perspective to engineering issues. His own academic background, however, is in business and finance. A native of Kansas, he received an Austin Scholarship to Northwestern and graduated with a business degree in 1964. He continued his education on a National Defense Education Act Fellowship at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in industrial administration with the help of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Award. Dr. Carter taught corporate finance at Harvard Business School from 1968 to 1977 and at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. From 1977-1982, he chaired the finance department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and then retired in 1983 as Professor and Associate Dean at the University of Maryland in College Park to focus on raising his daughter, Adela-Marie. Dr. Carter served for more than 30 years as a director and chair of the audit committee of A.G. Edwards and Sons, Inc., one of the country’s largest retail brokerage firms. He also served as treasurer and board member for Women and Philanthropy. The Carter Opportunity Scholarships fund was established to honor Dr. E. Eugene Carter’s wife, Dr. Rita Rodriguez. A Cuban immigrant, Dr. Rodriguez is a graduate of Puerto Rico Junior College, the University of Puerto Rico, and New York University. Her experiences as the first in her family to attend college, become a university professor, and serve as an expert in international finance exemplify the challenges and the potential for determined, intelligent women from immigrant and minority families. After marrying as junior faculty members at Harvard, they co-wrote three editions of a textbook, International Financial Management. Dr. Rodriguez was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1982 when she was appointed as a director of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. Reappointed by four U.S. presidents, she served in this position until 1999 when she retired as interim president. She is currently a director of several international corporations. The Carters’ daughter graduated from Skidmore College with honors in mathematics and fine arts and is now a slack line yoga teacher in Rincon, Puerto Rico.