Dr. Thomas Mensah

Thomas Owusu Mensah was born in Kumasi, Ghana, in 1950, to a cocoa-shipping merchant father. He showed an early gift for languages, winning Ghana's national French-language competition at both Ordinary and Advanced Level in 1968 and 1970, and attended Adisadel College in Cape Coast before earning a chemical engineering degree with honours from what is now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in 1974. A French government fellowship took him to Montpellier University in France for further study.

Mensah went on to build his career in the United States, where he developed a faster fiber-optic draw-and-coating process at Corning Glass Works during the 1980s, work that earned him four patents and helped make high-volume fiber-optic cable manufacturing commercially viable. Over his career he was awarded 14 patents across fiber optics and nanotechnology, contributing directly to the infrastructure that underpins today's high-speed internet, including undersea cables connecting continents.

In 2014 he was elected a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors, becoming the first African to be inducted — an honour he described as being recognised 'among very elite people,' noting that of the roughly 167 inventors honoured that year, only three, including him, were Black. He went on to found Georgia Aerospace Systems and later worked to establish technology hubs he called the 'Silicon Valley of Ghana' at Accra's Kofi Annan ICT Centre, and the 'Silicon Valley of the South' in Texas.

Mensah authored or edited five books on innovation, including the textbook Nanotechnology Commercialization, and served on the boards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the AIChE Foundation, and NASA's Space Grant Consortium at Georgia Tech. He died at the Catholic Hope Exchange Hospital in Kumasi on 27 March 2024, at the age of 74.