Remaining a lifelong student has led Nolan Code into the technology field with a mission to inspire the next generation.

In an interview with AFROTECH™, the New York City native, raised in Queens, joked that some have said his last name reflects his career path in tech. Like many other successful tech professionals, Code’s interest in the field began with taking apart computers and putting them back together.

His foray into the sector wasn’t immediate. He first attended Morehouse College and obtained a bachelor’s degree in history in 2003 while serving as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Reserve.

“I really didn’t find my groove until I got to the Atlanta University Center, which I was just called AUC now for short. It was the only place…where being smart and being a person of color was not only accepted but expected,” Code said of the AUC, a nonprofit that launched to represent four historically Black colleges and universities, including Morehouse.

Code told AFROTECH™ that curiosity and learning remained central to his journey. With an initial career goal in tech sales, he wanted to stay up-to-date in the sector. This also led him to the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business, where he earned a master of business administration in global business in 2014, gaining expertise in revenue forecasting, analysis of emerging markets, venture and international financing, managing global workforce, and more, his LinkedIn notes.

When the AI boom hit, Code spent a little more than a year at Accenture in 2019 as a data engineering specialist in AI, data engineering and architecture, per his LinkedIn. From 2021 to 2023, he worked at Microsoft as a senior cloud solution architect for data and AI in healthcare and life sciences. He managed the clinical data warehouse for a top healthcare provider and led the top AI sales engagement across the company by revenue, securing a $100 million Azure services renewal in the 2022 fiscal year, his LinkedIn notes.

Code’s education didn’t stop there. In 2023 he enrolled in Southern Methodist University’s Lyle School of Engineering to pursue a master’s in AI. A few months later, Code founded a quantum-health analytics venture, according to his LinkedIn. The venture, supported through Microsoft for Startups, secured $2.1 million in funding, and was later acquired by AWS Health.

Today, Code works as a senior solution engineer at Microsoft, with tasks involving pre-sales and product demos. He told AFROTECH™ that it’s about “aligning to a business pain point and [seeing] how we can use a tool to solve it.”

He will soon lead a virtual session titled “Quantum Computing, Cybernetics And AI: Insights for Future Innovators” for members of the AFROTECH™ Insider community. The session will discuss how quantum concepts disrupt AI, cybersecurity, and investing, and what makes it so critical, he mentioned in a LinkedIn post.

It will be held on Thursday Oct. 2 at 4 p.m EST.

Photo Credit: LinkedIn/ Nolan S. Code

“I think that when people hear quantum computing, if they’re even aware of it at all, it sounds like magic, right. And it’s really not. And I think the overarching thing that people should come away with is stay curious, because you never know where it can lead you,” Code said.

He also told AFROTECH™ that this work is part of his larger mission to inspire the next generation of physicists.

“Everything else is nice, but if we don’t do that, then I feel like I would have lost,” Code expressed.