Ursula Burns

Ursula Burns was born on 20 September 1958 and raised by a single mother in a housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, an upbringing marked by significant financial hardship; her mother ran a day care centre from their apartment to help fund Burns's education at a Catholic school she felt offered better opportunities. Burns excelled academically, particularly in mathematics and science, and pursued mechanical engineering, earning her bachelor's degree from Polytechnic Institute of New York University and a master's degree from Columbia University.

Burns joined Xerox Corporation in 1980 as a mechanical engineering intern while still completing her graduate studies, and the company sponsored her continued education in exchange for a work commitment, beginning a career at the company that would span more than three decades. She worked her way up through progressively senior engineering and product development roles, developing deep technical expertise in Xerox's core printing and imaging technologies.

Burns became an executive assistant to Xerox's then-CEO in the mid-1990s, a role that gave her direct exposure to the company's highest-level strategic decisions, and she continued rising through senior leadership positions, eventually becoming President of Xerox in 2007, overseeing the company's manufacturing, research and development operations during a significant period of technological transition for the business.

In 2009 Burns was appointed CEO of Xerox, becoming the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, a landmark achievement in American corporate history. Her appointment was also notable as one of the first instances of one woman directly succeeding another as CEO of a major American corporation, following Anne Mulcahy, reflecting a genuinely unusual continuity of women's leadership at the top of a major company.

As CEO, Burns led Xerox through a significant strategic transformation, most notably the 2010 acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, a major business process outsourcing company, substantially diversifying Xerox beyond its traditional printing and imaging business into services, a shift that reflected the broader technological disruption facing the printing industry as digital document management reduced demand for physical printing and copying.

Burns later oversaw Xerox's 2016 split into two separate companies, one focused on document technology and the other on business process services, before stepping down as CEO. She has continued a significant public and board-level career since, serving on numerous corporate boards and advisory bodies, and remaining a prominent voice on issues of diversity in corporate leadership and STEM education access, drawing consistently on her own path from public housing to the highest level of American corporate leadership.