Raised in rural Jamaica, Huntley Myrie (ENG’95) went on to design jet engine turbines, manage billion-dollar businesses, and earn one of this year’s Black Engineer of the Year awards
By Patrick L. Kennedy
Huntley Myrie (ENG’95) has no baby pictures, because his family didn’t own a camera. Raised in remote, rural Jamaica, Myrie and his older brother made their own toys from scrap wood. With no indoor plumbing, the Myries collected rainwater in barrels for cooking and bathing. If there was no rain, they walked a quarter-mile to a pond and carried water back on their heads. The family’s only other transportation was a donkey.
From age six up, when he wasn’t helping his family pick coffee beans or other crops, Myrie got to school and back by walking two miles each way, up and down weedy, pebbled country roads.
“There were no cars,” he says. “I’d see more airplanes than cars, flying over the Caribbean to North America or South America, and I’d marvel at them flying. ‘How do they do it? Their wings aren’t like birds’ wings.’ This was my six-year-old brain thinking. ‘What is that white smoke it’s trailing behind it?’” Myrie resolved then to someday, somehow, work on aircraft.
Although he earned As in his agricultural school, that transcript did not translate well when, at age 17, he moved to Brooklyn, and he was placed in the ninth grade. With no desire to wait around, Myrie got a GED, joined the US Army, and put himself through City Tech and Stony Brook University. In 1990, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and landed a spot in General Electric’s prestigious training program.
“Then I moved to Boston and started my career,” Myrie says.
While working full time for GE in Lynn, Massachusetts, designing jet engine turbines, Myrie attended the Boston University College of Engineering part time and earned his master’s in mechanical engineering. At GE, he met another BU student, Carolyn Renea Collins-Myrie (ENG’94,’00), whom he would marry.
Myrie cites a BU engineering and economics course as a “pivotal point” in his career: “It was bridging the gap between what an engineer does and the business side of it. That reinforced to me that I could think more systematically rather than as a component designer. It kind of gave me the bug to think bigger and more globally, linking the technology to the business to the customer and then to the overall global economy. That’s served me mightily in my pursuit of a career and took me to where I am today.”
He began a climb up the career ladder at GE and, later, Eaton Aerospace, dealing with different aircraft systems and larger clients, including airlines, the US Navy and Air Force, and major aircraft manufacturers. Today, Myrie is vice president of strategy and commercial business development for Spirit AeroSystems. He and his wife live in Dallas, and their three daughters have all earned or are earning degrees in STEM fields. Moving and traveling so often for work, Myrie is a frequent flyer who often offers fellow passengers a professional’s reassurance during air turbulence.
“I say, ‘At 35,000 feet, you cannot call a tow truck. Therefore, what we do every day [in designing and building airplanes] is very important, and we take it very seriously. We do so much testing—we do bird strike, ice ingestion. We put in a lot of redundancies, we break it, we shake it, we spend millions of dollars to make sure that when you’re on an airplane, you don’t have to think twice about it.’”
Besides BU, family, and various mentors along the way, Myrie credits much of his success to his hardscrabble upbringing: “I didn’t have excess; I come from a background of scarcity and limited opportunities, where you don’t waste things. So, the way I think and problem-solve is with that mindset. I treat a company’s money like it’s my own pocketbook.”
That’s one reason Myrie advocates for diversity in engineering—diversity of experiences and thought processes as well as cultures, he says. That passion has led him to volunteer for STEM outreach efforts across the country. For example, when he worked for GE Aviation in Ohio, he led a STEM program for public middle and high school kids in Cincinnati. More than a decade later, Myrie still hears from former students who now work in engineering.
“That was a labor of love for me, and I take pride in that,” Myrie says. “I just believe it’s so critical for us as a global community to embrace and encourage others to get into STEM.”
U.S. Black Engineer magazine cited Myrie’s volunteering and mentoring as well as his business success in honoring him with the Rodney Adkins Legacy Award as part of the 2023 Black Engineer of the Year awards.
“The best gift I received [upon graduating high school] was the commitment from Huntley to be a mentor, coach, and advocate,” wrote Lucien Kidd of Cincinnati in nominating Myrie for the award. “Huntley has been there to hold me accountable and push me through every pitfall and defining moment. The work and impact Huntley has made in every space he enters deserves to be recognized.”
Top: Photograph by Kenny W. Helton, Jr. (Spirit AeroSystems)
This story appears in the fall 2023 ENGineer magazine.