Kathleen Joan Callanan, F.SWE
1940–2025
Pioneering electrical engineer and genealogy researcher, Maryknoll Sister, and lifetime learner
Kathleen Joan Callanan, a SWE Fellow and senior life member whose intellectual pursuits ranged from electrical engineering to computer communications, genealogy, and the Japanese language, died suddenly on Jan. 18, 2025. She helped found and run the SWE Wichita Section and served as the first provisional director for SWE Region I in 1984-85, while advancing her engineering career and mentoring other women engineers.
Born in Detroit in February 1940, Callanan was an avid reader with a passion for learning. She earned a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering at the University of Michigan, where she studied in a unique program that combined science (physics) with engineering. She graduated in 1963 as one of only three women in a class of 2,000 in the college of engineering. Callanan joined SWE in 1963 and became a senior life member in 1982, and encouraged others to do the same.
Her first job was as an acoustical engineer for Hazeltine Corporation in Avon, Massachusetts. She designed sonar transducers and transducer arrays, a role she took on because of its challenges. There she solved a problem related to the thermal expansion of silicone rubber in an underwater microphone. At the same time, she enrolled in graduate studies in physics at Northeastern University and focused on sonar systems.
In 1966 she left industry and moved to Topsfield, Massachusetts, to become a member of the Maryknoll Sisters, an institute of Catholic women devoted to service and missionary work. She wrote papers on the integration of science and religion and used quantum mechanics to explain the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s treatise on humans and the cosmos.
Callanan’s first missionary assignment in 1968 was to Honolulu, where she taught physics, chemistry, algebra, and religion at Maryknoll High School. She earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Hawaii. There, she designed and produced a buffer storage system that helped link a typewriter device to a radio transceiver, reformatting the system’s computer code along the way.
In 1971, she was reassigned to Tokyo, where she worked at a national laboratory by day and a crisis service at night. As a visiting faculty member at Sophia University in Tokyo, Callanan taught Japanese researchers how to write papers in English and hone their technical communications skills for a Western audience. She was one of the first foreigners to deliver a technical presentation in Japanese to the Japan Physical Society. While in Japan, she co-authored eight technical papers and three presentations and designed several technological breakthroughs in optics and sensors.
In 1979, Callanan went to work for The Boeing Company in Wichita, Kansas, as an engineer and engineering manager working on military aircraft. She managed a team of 30 engineers working on more than 20 projects and developed the company’s failure analysis laboratory. Her favorite assignments included work on the A-6 aircraft and U.S. Air Force One.
She founded the Women in Engineering at Boeing employee group and encouraged Boeing to participate in and send employees to SWE national conferences. She informally mentored many women in their engineering careers and successfully recommended a number of women to Boeing’s management training program.
Callanan retired from Boeing in 1995 to care for her mother. Later, she founded her own consulting firm to help companies navigate the nascent internet. She went on to work in genetic genealogy, rediscovering her lost ancestors and helping others do the same.
A quick and avid reader and bingo enthusiast, Callanan was devoted to her nieces and nephews and their dozens of children and grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her parents as well as one sister and is survived by another. She is remembered for her wit, wisdom, and unending intellectual curiosity.
Sources
SWE archives; Dignity Memorial; Boeing News, Wichita edition, June 22, 1990.
