A brand-new video series that highlights the diverse experiences of Black boys and men in the science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) fields, has launched under the direction of a prominent researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Brian A. Burt has created the Black Males in Engineering (BME) project, an interactive guide that spotlights his critical research over the past decade. The project not only chronicles the trajectories of young Black men in STEM but also offers recommendations and suggestions on how to guide Black males in STEM fields from primary school through the Ph.D.
The videos draw upon the largest collection of qualitative data on Black males in engineering graduate programs and contributes to the knowledge base related to understanding how Black males develop their perceptions of what it means, for example, to be an engineer, all the while broadening their participation in educational and workforce pathways. 
Dr. Brian A. Burt
“Aspiring to a career in engineering can be daunting for Black males and a less traveled road they are expected to pave themselves,” said Burt, a UW-Maidson professor of education and director of the Wisconsin Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB). Burt is also a 2019 Diverse Emerging Scholar. “We aim to provide a growing and well-informed community of support for these hardworking students.”
In the wake of the COVID pandemic, where so many researchers pivoted to Zoom to share their scholarship during webinars, Burt thought that he needed to create a new way to make his research more accessible to others outside of the academy. His solution was short, creative videos for the “people out there who will never read my articles, can’t access my articles because they won’t be able to go to conferences, those are the people that I want to reach,” he said.
Burt culled together ten years of his research, and with the assistance of UW-Madison, created a series of videos with a targeted audience in mind. All of the videos combined, he said, tells a powerful story of where the nation is with regard to Black males, education and STEM.
