Science & Technology

As a junior studying bioengineering, Amida Koroma was a fixture on the dean’s list at the University of Maryland. Yet Koroma, who is Black, said she felt as if many of her white peers dismissed her as less capable. “When we’re working on group projects, they’ll say things like, ‘You can do the typing,’ as […]

A quiet panic started happening sometime last summer in the world of science. The root of the issue began long before that, but by October 2023 it could no longer be ignored: People don’t really trust science anymore. More specifically, a growing chunk of Americans who lived through the peak global impact of COVID-19 now […]

Scientists are held in high esteem by most Americans, with public confidence in scientists outpacing that for other prominent groups, but Black adults are significantly less likely than White adults to share that view.

Our list of influential Black physicists is as diverse as the field of study. These leaders in the field of physics are conducting research in areas like nuclear research, medicine, astronomy, and more. They are paving the way for the next generation of physicists. In This Article: Black Physicists Making Important Contributions to the Field […]

Facial recognition technology promises to alert us if our children are skipping out on their college classes, to zip us past all the suckers waiting in line at the airport and to create nationwide databases to catch the “bad guys.” This newest biometric data is sold as a shortcut to utopia: technology that delivers responsible […]

Since the Covid-19 pandemic has forced many researchers out of their labs and field sites and most students from their classrooms and dorms, the process of learning about and doing science has moved almost entirely online. Lab group meetings have migrated to Zoom; office hours to Slack; manuscript writing to Google Docs . . .

With the airing of “Forgotten Genius,” the definitive account of the life of African-American chemist Percy Julian to date, it seems like an opportune moment to ask to what degree the racism Julian endured still holds sway in the scientific world, 32 years after his death. To what extent does the color of one’s skin […]

Starting in 1932, 600 African American men from Macon County, Alabama were enlisted to partake in a scientific experiment on syphilis. The “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” was conducted by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and involved blood tests, x-rays, spinal taps and autopsies of the subjects. The goal […]

Results from the 2005 to 2015 Data of the National Center for Education Statistics African-Americans remain underrepresented in the physical sciences and engineering fields. Using data collected on the ethnicity of all bachelor’s degree recipients from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) from 2005 to 2015, this report presents findings on bachelor’s degrees earned […]

Black women in the United States have been pioneers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Too often their enormous contributions were overlooked. Some of these women: Dr. Patricia Bath, who invented a laser device to correct cataracts; Dr. Dorothy Brown, one of the first Black women to become a surgeon in the United […]