Anthony Graham, chairperson of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, Louis Judge III, the university’s director of technology transfer, and Sam Cook, adjunct professor in the speech communication department, all received their awards Feb. 20.

40 Leaders Under Forty acknowledges leaders for their accomplishments and contributions to the Piedmont Triad. Leaders will be featured in the Feb. 21 print edition of The Business Journal.

Graham is a professor whose work in the classroom benefits future and current teachers and whose research and engagement in the Greensboro community benefit the next generations of African Americans.

His research focuses on African American adolescent males and how the schooling process promotes or inhibits the construction of their academic and cultural identities.

Graham has applied that research extensively in the Greensboro community. He created the Charles Hamilton Houston Summer Residential Leadership Institute for adolescent black males, the Brother-2-Brother mentoring program, the Lunch with the Kings program, the annual African American Male Academic Achievement Banquet and the Vance H. Chavis Oratorical Contest.

He has served as co-chair of the Early Literacy Subcommittee for the Guilford schools’ African American Male Educational Excellence initiative. Graham holds membership in the GCS Achieving Educational Excellence for African American Male Students project team and the GCS Board of Education Achievement Gap Committee.

As director of technology transfer, Judge is responsible for negotiating licenses for university-owned intellectual property, developing business models for university startup companies, constructing the University’s intellectual property policies and procedures, and seeking commercial partners who can contribute to A&T’s research efforts.

He was named National MBA of the Year by the National Black MBA Association (NBMBAA) in 2013.

Judge created NBMBAA’s annual jobs fair in Greensboro and the North Carolina NBMBAA mini-conference and is the founder of the Innovation Challenge at N.C. A&T.

Before joining N.C. A&T in 2004, Judge was a technology innovation specialist with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, where he improved the technology commercialization process in the Structures and Acoustics Division at the NASA Glenn Research Center.

Judge is a 2012 graduate of Leadership Greensboro and a 2013 member of the Guilford County Citizen Academy. He serves on the boards of the N.C. A&T Center for Entrepreneurship, the East Market Street Merchants Association, the Jessa Maria Foundation, Just Plain Etiquette, and the N.C. Agricultural Biotech Strategic Projects Workgroup.

Samuel C. “Chip” Cook IV is a business analyst and systems administrator for the United States Courts, the U.S. Bankruptcy Administrator for the Middle District of North Carolina and a lecturer at UNC-Greensboro and North Carolina A&T State University.

Cook is the founder of the North Carolina Leadership Academy—a charter school in Kernersville, N.C. focused on leadership development and college preparatory academics.

At the North Carolina A&T, Cook has taught in the department of speech communication as an adjunct professor since 2002.

View the complete list of Triad leaders click here.