ASHRAE Historical Leadership Recall Interview Colleen. S. Smith Professional Engineer, First Woman President of the Florida West Coast Chapter, ASHRAE Technical Committee Chair Condensed from interview, notes and resume furnished in 2003.

Colleen Smith's first experience with ASHRAE was at a chapter meeting in Tampa, where she had planned to attend the social hour, but ended up staying for the whole meeting. She quickly saw the potential for networking was tremendous and enjoyed meeting people in various aspects of the HVAC industry in a social setting.

For a few years she attended meetings and then was asked to chair the TEGA committee. She enjoyed serving in that role and found the activities of TEGA complemented her position at Florida Power in the energy efficiency programs department.

Not long after, she was nominated to the board and eventually became president of the chapter. She doesn't see anything particularly impressive about being the first woman president of the FWC chapter, "Just the first locally of many female Florida West Coasters that will get the opportunity to serve our wonderful chapter as president," Colleen says.

She admits that attending engineering school during the early 1980's had its interesting times. "This was before many women had discovered the wonderful world of engineering" as she was often the only female enrolled in many of the engineering courses. And it was especially interesting coming from her high school in New Orleans - an all-girls Catholic high school, where she played varsity sports and was captain of the basketball team. She credits her interest in science and mathematics back to her teachers and the high school, which maintained very high academic standards and focused on those areas.

She attended Nicholls State University located on Bayou Lafourche in Thibodaux, Louisiana on academic scholarships and enrolled in the engineering technology program. After graduating in 1981 from Nicholls with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Technology, she moved back to New Orleans and enrolled in graduate school at the University of New Orleans in the mechanical engineering department. Because her undergraduate degree was in an engineering technology format, she had to take several undergraduate courses in addition to the graduate courses while at UNO. During that time she worked as a graduate assistant in the mechanical engineering department.

While in graduate school she began her first job in the HVAC industry - a part-time job with Johnson Controls as an applications engineer in the New Orleans office. During that time the Louisiana Superdome was undergoing a major HVAC retrofit and Johnson was awarded the contract, which included all the bells and whistles of the day. Colleen's responsibility was to program the graphics of the controls systems. Upon completion of that job, Johnson was awarded the contract for the new New Orleans Convention Center where she performed a similar function.

After graduating from the University of New Orleans in 1983 with a master's degree in Mechanical Engineering she began work full time with Johnson Controls. Her fiancée, Mark Smith (also past president of the Florida West Coast Chapter), whom she met while they were fellow engineering students at Nicholls State, graduated from the College of Business at Mississippi State University with an MBA. Upon graduation, he became employed by the Carrier Corporation in Tampa. She and Mark married in 1986 and she transferred from the New Orleans branch of Johnson Controls to the Tampa branch.

While in Tampa she also worked for Delta Engineering and then moved to Florida Power when the utility was embarking on major energy efficiency incentive programs. She is currently the Marketing Director of Dais-Analytic Corporation, a technology development company that manufactures moisture transfer materials for the HVAC and fuel cell industries.

She has also been involved with ASHRAE at the national level and has chaired the Technical Committee on Electrical Systems and has also been on the Annual Program Committee.

Her advice for anyone in ASHRAE: