Women have played an important role in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, with Grace Wilson becoming the first woman to have at the rank of at least assistant professor in the Illinois College of Engineering.
Written by Chelsey Coombs
Professor Grace Wilson, as featured in the Champaign-Urbana News Gazette on February 2, 1957.
Women have played an important role in the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, with Grace Wilson becoming the first woman to have at the rank of at least assistant professor in the Illinois College of Engineering.
Wilson was born on October 15, 1907, and graduated from Urbana High School. After receiving her B.S. in Architecture from the University of Illinois in 1931, she moved to Chicago to work for architectural design firms. She moved back to Champaign to teach mechanical and architectural drawing at Champaign High School from 1941-1944, at the same time working to receive her M.S. in Architecture in 1942. She was a member of W.A.C. Air Transport Command from May 1944 to September 1945, and in fall 1946, Wilson joined the Department of General Engineering as an instructor.
She was well-liked and respected: a 1957 News-Gazette article found it “not unusual for former students still on the campus to drop into her office when they are in the Transportation Building.”
She was a member of many professional societies and helped organize and advise the student chapter of the Women’s Engineering Society in 1961.
Wilson would often co-host picnics for female engineering students and luncheons for high school girls interested in science and engineering.
A licensed architect in the state of Illinois, she co-authored two textbooks, Geometry for Architects and Workbook Problems for Architects in Geometry.
Wilson eventually became a full professor in 1972 but retired the next year. She died February 28, 2005.