Black History in STEM

An editorial by Malegapuru William Makgoba, Health Ombud of the Republic of South Africa, 2020

Editor’s Commentary from the Journal of Negro Education, 2015

Commentary from a medical doctor and scientist, and first African Americal to be awarded a PhD in neuroscience at Duke University, 2020

Recognition for some notable black scientsts including Alice Augusta Ball, Yamagiwa Katsusaburo and Alice Catherine Evans, 2018

In 1874 Edward Bouchet became the first African American to earn a degree from Yale University. The Summer 2009 issue of The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education is dedicated to his memory

n 1935, in Minshall Laboratory, DePauw alumnus Percy L. Julian (1899-1975) first synthesized the drug physostigmine, previously only available from its natural source, the Calabar bean. His pioneering research led to the process that made physostigmine readily available for the treatment of glaucoma. It was the first of Julian’s lifetime of achievements in the chemical synthesis of commercially important natural products.

Groundbreaking U.S. space program mathematician and inspiration for the best selling book and award winning film Hidden Figures.

From the British Journal for the History of Mathematics, 2020

This scientist’s imaging instruments have been used on sounding rockets, the space shuttle, and even the Moon.

Herman Kojo Chinery-Hesse is a Ghanaian technology entrepreneur and the founder of theSOFTtribe, the oldest and foremost software company in Ghana

Born in 1942, Dr. Guion Bluford was the first African American to go into space. Read a 1995 interview with him here...

Aprille Ericsson-Jackson was the first Black female at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to hold a Ph.D. in engineering. She is now at the cutting edge of some of the most ambitious space exploration endeavors at NASA.

Vivien Theodore Thomas was an American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s.

Issued by Henry E. Baker, this record was published in 1913 on the 50th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln issuing the emancipation proclamation.