Patricia Carter Sluby is a former patent examiner and past president of the National Intellectual Property Law Association, an organization founded in 1973 by African American patent attorneys. Sluby has spent years searching the U.S. Patent Office for information on inventions by African Americans, locating nearly 2,000 patents. She has published her research in The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity and The Entrepreneurial Spirit of African American Inventors.
