WHY STEM NEEDS TO FOCUS ON SOCIAL JUSTICE: Black students do well when schools let them do good.

• Author: Block, Daniel

Millard McElwee was 12 years old when Hurricane Katrina slammed into Louisiana. Having evacuated to the relative safety of Shreveport before the storm hit, McElwee at first didn't realize the enormity of the catastrophe. But as his family drove back to their suburban New Orleans home, the carnage was unmistakable. Trees were down. Towns all along Interstate 55 were in blackouts. Even Baton Rouge appeared to have no power. "It's still something I vividly remember," McElwee said of the outages. "You could tell the difference, even in the cities during the day."

While McElwee's own home was without electricity for a month, he was still lucky: Located north of the city, his house hadn't flooded. Many of his relatives, who lived in New Orleans's Ninth Ward and Metairie, weren't so fortunate. Some moved in with McElwee temporarily. At one point, his family's two-bedroom house and office trailer hosted 13 people. They depended on canned water and National Guard-issued ready-to-eat meals, or MREs.

"It was nasty," McElwee said of the meals, which are used by the Department of Defense to sustain troops in combat. He chuckled. "It was nasty back then when they gave it to us. It was nasty years later when we tried it again to see if it would get any better."

Eating the foul-tasting MREs is one of McElwee's most striking Katrina memories. But it's hardly the only facet of the storm that left a lasting impression. McElwee remembers engineering experts from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, coming to the city to assess what had gone wrong. He recalls talking with his father about why the levees and the Army Corps of Engineers had failed so badly. It gave him a new goal: to become an engineer himself so he could better protect people from catastrophes.

After the storm, McElwee dedicated himself to his classes, becoming a straight-A student. He began looking at the engineering programs of various universities. He visited MIT's website daily. Doing so helped him find the school's Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science program--a renowned and selective academic camp for teenagers from underrepresented communities. McElwee, who is Black, attended, and then went on to study civil engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Now he is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he works on quantifying how natural disasters impact communities of color.

"Natural disasters don't discriminate," McElwee, now 27, explained. "But we do know there are disparities in the responses and reaction times." His job is to figure out how large the disparities are and why they exist. To that end, in 2019, McElwee built a mathematical model that predicts how floods impact travel times in New Orleans. It's the first to explore the reasons these times go up more for minorities. One explanation for the discrepancy, he found, is that marginalized groups typically have to travel farther for work. But another is that the infrastructure in their neighborhoods is more vulnerable, and once it's damaged, authorities are slower to fix it. Minorities "typically live in communities that haven't had as much investment in terms of recovery of the network," McElwee told me. "Previous natural disasters have shown that these areas are usually not serviced as quickly."

McElwee's work fits into a broader trend among Black people in STEM fields. According to experts, scientists of color are more likely than their white peers to work on problems with a clear relationship to issues of equity. "There have been several studies that have shown that Black students in particular, and students of color more broadly, tend to pursue careers that are going to allow them to have some sort of social justice orientation," said Tia Madkins, an education professor at the University of Texas at Austin. In a 2015 study of 2,697 undergraduate STEM students, more than 50 percent of underrepresented students of color said working for social change was either "essential" or "very important" to their career goals. For others, the figure was just 37 percent.

But, unfortunately, there aren't many Black students in the STEM fields. Black people are 12 percent of the U.S...