Dr. Sekazi Kauze Mtingwa
Physicist
Sekazi Kauze Mtingwa was born in 1949 as Michael Von Sawyer in Atlanta. Mtingwa was educated at racially segregated schools for most of his primary and secondary education. During his sophomore year in high school, the Georgia State Science Fair was integrated. Mtingwa participated and won a first-place prize in biology, which included books on science, mathematics, and engineering.
After high school, Mtingwa attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor’s degree in physics and mathematics in 1971. During graduate school, Mtingwa changed his name to Sekazi Kauze Mtingwa. The name comes from a phrase in Bondei, a Tanzanian language: Sekazi (male hard worker) Kauze (inquisitive) Mtingwa (literally “breastbone,” but the word refers to someone who can overcome many problems).
He received a Ph.D. in theoretical high energy physics from Princeton University in 1976. After holding post-doctoral positions at the University of Rochester and the University of Maryland, Mtingwa was awarded a Ford Foundation fellowship in 1980 before working with Fermilab in Illinois as a research physicist in 1981. At Fermilab, Mtingwa and James Bjorken developed the theory of intrabeam scattering.
From 1988 to 1991, Mtingwa worked at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. There, he came up with ideas about advanced wakefields, plasma acceleration, and photon colliders. Mtingwa joined the physics department at North Carolina A&T State University in 1991. While at the institution, he chaired the physics department, was instrumental in establishing the institution’s Interdisciplinary Research Center, and co-founded the National Society of Black Physicists. He returned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an MLK Visiting Professor in 2001, where he worked at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. In 2008, Mtingwa became a fellow of the American Physical Society. He retired in 2012.