Emigre engineers

Jaime Jim Amorocho received in 1943 a BS degree from Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota Colombia, emigrating later that year to the USA. He received in 1946 his MS in civil engineering from Pennsylvania State University, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley CA, in 1961. Soon thereafter, he was appointed assistant professor of hydrology and hydraulics at the University of California, Davis, later being appointed to professor of water science and engineering at this institution. 

He emigrated in 1900 with his parents to the United Kingdom, and to the USA in 1915. He began his engineering career in 1929, working mainly in the fields of gas turbines and jet propulsion. He was an early pioneer in one of the first rocket companies of the USA fi om 1942 to 1946. He held between 1946 and 1953 a joint appointment between aeronautical and mechanical engineering at Piu due University,... 

The collapse of the Soviet Block had an especially severe impact on the Russian science and engineering system e.g., the Academogorodok (Russian academic semi-city in Nowosybirsk in Siberia) suffered from unemployment and brain-drain related emigration (Bird 1994). Another example was the destruction of the seed bank in the Institute of Plant Industry in Petersburg, where a unique plant collection that survived the Second World War was destroyed in order to make space for luxury housing (Rosenthal 2010). 

Historically in the U.S., the traditional civil engineering talent pool has primarily comprised white males. The pool is naturally larger when females and people of color are added. .. and larger still if the pool can comprise engineering professionals and students who have emigrated to the U.S. 

Zworykin, Vladimir (1889-1982) A Russian who emigrated to the United States after World War 1, Zworykin worked at the Westinghouse laboratories in Pittsburgh. An engineer and inventor who patented a cathode ray tube television transmitting and receiving system in 1923, he later worked in development for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in New Jersey, where his inventions were perfected in time to be used to telecast the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. He also contributed to the development of the electron microscope. 

Zworykin received a scholarship and went to study X-rays at the College de France in Paris in the laboratory of a French theoretical physicist Paul Langevin, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize 25 times between 1910 to 1946. After the Russian Revolution, Zworykin emigrated to the United States in 1919, where he first worked at the Westinghouse laboratory in Pittsburgh on the development of radio tubes and photocells. In that period he defended his thesis on photoelectric cells and earned his Ph.D. in Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But his main attention was devoted to the development of television and he patented the iconoscope in 1923 - the first of 120 patents. A little bit later he patented the kinescope, too. In 1929 he was appointed the new director of the Electronic Research Laboratory for the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in Camden, New Jersey. In the same year, at a convention of radio engineers, Zworykin demonstrated the newly developed television receiver with the kinescope and applied for the first patent in color television. 

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