Kimberly Moore is used to defying odds.
She is among the 35% of Americans working in STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — who are women, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. She’s also among only 9% of STEM workers who are Black.
And she owns an award-winning, multimillion-dollar electrical engineering firm, something she had never seen accomplished by someone who looked like her.
But she says she never doubted herself — an attitude she attributes to her upbringing in Chicago.
“I grew up on the block with no girls,” say Moore, 44, who lives in West Town. “I played football, I played basketball, we talked sports. On the South Side, you’re playing out front, so there’s sidewalks and barely any grass. Or you’re playing in the alley, where it’s nothing but concrete rocks. If you fall, you just get up.”
As founder and president of KDM Engineering on West Jackson Boulevard, Moore oversees more than 100 employees at a company with yearly revenue of more than $15 million and offices downtown and in Baltimore and Philadelphia. The rapidly growing firm specializes in telecommunications design and utilities — overseeing design and distribution for gas and electric power.
And Moore and her wife Danni Moore also have opened 1308 Chicago, a restaurant west of Goose Island that’s Michelin-recommended, with plans to add a second location later this year.
Moore says she’s determined to give back to underrepresented youth, providing opportunities to follow in her footsteps. Her nonprofit Calculated Genius has provided programming, mentoring and $295,000 in scholarships to students interested in STEM.
“It’s 2024,” Moore says. “I don’t want to be the ‘first’ and the ‘only.’ I’m trying to see who’s next.”
‘Not going to get me out that easy’
As a child, Moore says she was a “tinkerer” who would get recruited to put up curtains or set up TVs for family members.
After excelling in math and science at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, she got her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Northern Illinois University, where she played Division I basketball. Also passionate about music, she returned to NIU to get her master’s in sound engineering. The advance degree allowed her to run her own successful recording studio, 4 Moore Studios, for many years.
“She is one of the few people who uses both sides of her brain,” says Danni Moore, 37. “She can play all of the instruments. She can dance. She can do everything under the sun, and then she can also put together expense reports” and profit-and-loss statements.
As Moore began her career in electrical engineering, she says she found that the field wasn’t always accommodating to women.
“There was no women’s bathroom in the trailer that they had for the design engineering team because there were no women on the team before I got there,” she says of one of her jobs. “They had just converted both bathrooms to be men’s bathrooms.”
Moore’s competitive spirit wouldn’t allow her to be discouraged.
“You’re not going to get me out that easy,” she says.
Moore says she kept moving up until she hit a ceiling with her last employer, for which she helped build a utilities department.
“We became the company’s No. 1 revenue generator, but it did not equate in terms of salary and bonus,” she says. “And I realized that I could do this exact thing for myself.”
Moore struck out on her own in 2009 but faced difficulty getting her firm started amid the recession. Then, she took time off to care for her father, who has since died.
She returned to KDM Engineering, relying on her own research — “Google university,” she calls it — to build the company.
Despite not having a lot of investors or loans, KDM Engineering landed its first contract in 2012. By 2015, the company was a prime contractor for ComEd.
“A lot of people were telling her that she couldn’t do it,” Danni Moore says. “The number of grown men who would speak ill about her or accidentally send the wrong email that was supposed to go to somebody else that mentioned something negative about her — she never took it personally. She would even talk to the person and laugh it off with them. If people are talking negatively about you, you are doing something right.”
KDM Engineering has designed more than 1,000 power infrastructure projects in Illinois, including a smart-meters program and the powering of facilities for companies including WeatherTech in Bolingbrook. The firm also worked with T-Mobile and Crown Castle to help expand 5G in the Chicago area.
KDM is working on the Bronzeville Community Microgrid and the billion-dollar Bronzeville Lakefront mixed-use project at the former Michael Reese Hospital site.
“She effectively has bootstrapped herself to be a pivotal person in the field,” says David Schwartz, 77, a retired business executive who has been her mentor. “The only help that she got was from some advisers like myself who were absolutely drawn to her conviction.”
Schwarz says KDM Engineering could be an even greater force with more aggressive marketing.
“She could grow five times if she wanted to,” he says.
Nurturing future STEM leaders
Aiming to help other women and people from underrepresented communities succeed in STEM, Moore founded the Calculated Genius nonprofit in 2016.
Housed within KDM’s offices, it offers a “STEMinist” scholarship for young women, a summer educational program for the Chicago Public Schools and other resources. It’s now developing a cohort of 150 high school and college students with the aim of helping them secure internships and get STEM jobs.
Calculated Genius executive director Brian Biederman says students appreciate Moore’s down-to-earth personality.
“She has a really great way with the students,” Biederman says. “Very quickly, they find that they can ask her questions that maybe they can’t ask other adults.”
Moore says having a diverse workforce equates to diversity of thought.
“You can’t get that from having one group of people that have had the same experiences,” she says. “You have to bring in and collaborate with everybody. The businesses that don’t probably won’t go far, or they’ll be surpassed by those that do.”
As Moore and her wife prepare to open the second 1308 Chicago restaurant, in East Garfield Park, she says she’s going to curb her appetite for starting new projects.
“I have said that, in my 40s now, I am going to stop doing that,” she says.
“She has said that every year for the past 10 years, at least,” Danni Moore says, laughing. “Everything she wants happens as she wants it to happen.”
