Dr. Bonita J. (Bonnie) Campbell is Professor Emerita of Engineering at California State University, Northridge, where she spent 33 years from 1975 until her retirement in 2008. She was the first woman hired into a tenure-track engineering position at CSUN, the first to gain tenure, and , after her promotion to professor in 1982 , the first to chair an engineering department. She went on to chair the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering and Applied Mechanics for two terms before founding an entirely new department in 2001 .
Her route to the chair was not a conventional academic one. She began in architectural engineering and business administration at the University of Colorado, Boulder, left after three years for industry, and completed her B.S. in applied mathematics at Colorado State University in 1967 . She then spent a decade in industry , most notably as the first female industrial engineer at Kaiser Steel Corporation , while earning an M.B.A. at Pepperdine University and an M.S. in engineering systems at the University of Redlands, both in 1973, before capping the sequence with a Ph.D. from UCLA in 1979 . That industrial grounding shaped what she later built at CSUN: a department oriented toward production and systems problems rather than abstract theory.
In 1975, her first year on the faculty, she founded the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program, securing grant and industry funding to support women entering non-traditional majors. WISE brought national recognition to the college and quintupled the percentage of women students enrolled in its programs . She served as Associate Vice President for Academic Planning and Resources from 1986 to 1991 in a newly created unit, then returned to department leadership, and in 2001 created the Department of Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Management in response to regional demand for systems and production specialists , the only programs of their kind in the Los Angeles area at the time . As founding chair she established five degree programs, gained the department's first accreditation, quintupled its enrolment, and supervised hundreds of graduate students .
Her giving is as structural as her institution-building. She created the Bonita J. Campbell Engineering Management Endowment and then doubled it with a second $25,000 contribution, supplementing the gift through monthly payroll deductions; a colleague noted that her determination to give students the best opportunities was "outmatched only by her generosity" . After retiring she established the Dr. Bonita J. Campbell Endowment for Women in Science and Engineering in 2009, centred in the Oviatt Library, and has contributed to it every year since . She has been recognised with the Society of Women Engineers' Distinguished Engineering Educator Award (1988), the CSUN Distinguished Teaching Award, and the Dean Ed Peckham Award in 2019 . Her oral history was recorded for the CSUN Leaders project in March 2018 .
Dr. Campbell's career is a study in the difference between being admitted to a field and changing it. She was the first woman CSUN hired into a tenure-track engineering post, the first to earn tenure, and the first to chair a department , but the more consequential fact is what she did once inside. WISE quintupled the proportion of women students in the college's programs, and the department she founded from nothing in 2001 now has five degree programs and its accreditation.
The industrial decade matters here. Before she ever set foot in a classroom she had been the first female industrial engineer at Kaiser Steel, and that experience is visible in the department she built: manufacturing systems, production, engineering management , problems defined by what a plant actually needs rather than by what a discipline finds elegant. Manuscripts in engineering management frequently fail on exactly that gap, proposing methods that no practitioner could adopt.
She has also funded what she built, repeatedly and without fanfare , doubling her own endowment, giving through payroll deductions, and contributing to the WISE endowment every year since 2009. That is the same instinct in a different register, and it is why we are glad to have her judgement attached to the manuscripts APC reviews.
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