Winslow Sargeant is living the American dream.
Growing up in Dorchester, a largely African-American neighborhood in Boston, Sargeant had a front-row seat to the riots that broke out when a judge ordered schools there to desegregate in 1974 – as a sixth-grader, riding the bus to an unwelcoming neighborhood.
One of the few children on his block to go on to college, Sargeant turned down basketball scholarship offers to concentrate on his engineering courses, earning a bachelor’s degree from Boston’s Northeastern University, a master’s from Iowa State University and a doctorate from UW-Madison.