WASHINGTON, March 26, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — On February 28, 2025, the Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice bestowed the IP Social Justice Lifetime Achievement Award on Patricia Carter Ives Sluby, a retired United States Patent and Trademark Office Patent Examiner, registered patent agent, and the author of ground breaking works which chronicle the history of black inventors and patent holders in the United States.
Social Justice luncheon panelists from left to right: Dalindyebo Shabalala, Kara Swanson, Honoree Patricia Sluby, Lateef Mtima, and John Whitman
“Patricia Sluby researched, documented, and published critical works detailing the innovative achievements of America’s black inventors,” noted Lateef Mtima, Director of IIPSJ and a Professor of Law at the Howard University School of Law, “thanks to her work, this previously lost history of African American accomplishment has been recovered and has provided the foundation for important legal scholarship, as well as inspiration for modern day inventors from all walks of American life.”
Patricia Sluby grew up in Richmond, Virginia, where her parents were committed to ensuring that she and her three siblings all attended college. She excelled in science and math, and graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Virginia Union University in 1960, and in 2015 she received the Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from the University.
Encouraged by a fellow chemist, Patricia Sluby joined the US Patent and Trademark Office as a patent examiner in the early days of the Equal Employment Opportunity program and later achieved the status of a Patent Cooperation Treaty examiner, in the filing system administered by the International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Patricia Sluby began compiling facts and information on African American inventors, including women inventors, and published articles in USPTO journals and many other national publications, including the 1990 Bicentennial Celebration—United States Patent and Copyright Laws Proceedings, Events and Addresses. Her books include Creativity and Inventions: The Genius of Afro-Americans and Women in the United States and Their Patents; The Inventive Spirit of African Americans; and The Entrepreneurial Spirit of African American Inventors.
Dr. Kara W. Swanson, Professor of Law at the Northeastern University School of Law commends the unique value of Patricia Sluby’s works. “Patricia Sluby has devoted decades to the painstaking and critical work of identifying Black inventors. Her recovery of lost stories has enabled us to understand how inventiveness exists in all segments of the US population, a lesson that we cannot afford to forget as we plan for the future.”
In addition to her repertoire of books and articles, Patricia Sluby’s has a long history of public service, including appointment as a Department of Commerce Science and Technology Fellow and to a subcommittee on Domestic Monetary Policy for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, where she drafted a bill to place the first woman bank president in the US on a coin. She has served as Special Director in the Office of Cultural Resources of the National Park Service and as a technical advisor for the USPTO film From Dreams to Reality: A Tribute to Minority Inventors. In 1984, Patricia Sluby received the Employee of the Year award from the Department of Commerce, and the USPTO Commissioner’s EEO award for 1993 and in 1996, a bronze medal for superior federal service.
Patricia Sluby is also a member of the board of directors of the Museum for Black Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which was founded in 2011, and is co-curator of the exhibit, Patented Ingenuity: The Art of African American Inventors, at the Prince George’s African American Museum and Cultural Center. “Patricia Sluby has served as a productive member of the MBIE Board,” notes Dr. John R. Whitman, Executive Director of the Museum, “Her experience as a patent examiner qualifies her as a role model for aspiring Black female achievers as does her scholarship and original research on Black innovators and entrepreneurs in her publications, which provide the leading source of content for the Museum.”
Patricia Sluby is past president of the National Intellectual Property Law Association and a contributing editor of the Journal of the National Society of Black Engineers. She holds 22 copyright registrations, is a sister in the Alpha Kappa Alpha, Inc. sorority, and is the proud mother of two daughters, Felicia, an architectural engineer and Julia, a medical doctor.
SOURCE Institute for Intellectual Property and Social Justice (IIPSJ)
