thee ceo

The new head of Xerox Corp. is a native New Yorker who grew up in a lower East Side housing project.

Xerox will be the first Fortune 500 company headed by a black woman when Ursula Burns, 50, takes the reigns this summer.

Burns climbed the corporate ladder at Xerox, beginning as a summer engineering intern in 1980 and rising to president of the printing giant in 2002.

She helped to build Xerox into the world's largest maker of high-speed color printers.

Last year, Burns ranked 10th on Fortune magazine's top 50 Most Powerful Women in America. She's the second-highest placed African-American woman behind only Oprah Winfrey, who was ranked No. 8.