Only Six Blacks Teaching in the Nation’s 40 Leading Departments of Astronomy

Research conducted by Donna Nelson, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Oklahoma, has found only six black faculty members in the astronomy departments of the 40 universities with the largest research budgets in the discipline. There are nearly 600 astronomers at these 40 educational institutions.

There are African Americans who are full professors of astronomy at Penn State, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota. The blacks who are associate professors are at the University of Delaware and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.