Highlighting Minorities in Chemistry

Many students in UK schools and universities may grow up with a narrow image of who scientists are, often seeing them as predominantly white and male, as the contributions made by women and members of minoritised communities are often missing from the educational curriculum. 

Lewis Howard Latimer, an African American inventor, and the son of formerly enslaved parents, invented the carbon filament in 1881 that made the light bulb a useful device. Yet, Lewis’s contribution is rarely acknowledged in school classrooms, with credit for the invention of the light bulb given to his contemporary, Thomas Alva Edison. 
Is it not time ~150 years after this invention that Lewis Latimer is also given credit for the invention of the light bulb in the curriculum, especially given his disadvantaged background? 

About the HMiC Project

With funding from the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), we have co-created resources with chemistry students that highlight scientists from underrepresented backgrounds, and their contributions to chemistry and broader STEM fields.  
A selection of resources are provided below and consist of fact and information sheets, posters, activity sheets and short videos. The aim of this project is to increase the percentage of students from underrepresented communities studying STEM subjects with a particular focus on chemistry, and thus address the ‘leaky pipeline’ of the progression of people from minoritised ethnicities to positions of seniority in academia and industry as identified by the RSC's Missing Elements report.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements and thanks to Aisha Sharif and Israt-Zahan Chowdhury who were the pioneers of this project in the summer of 2021 when they were undergraduate students at QMUL. This work is continuing through the RSC funded Missing Elements Grants Scheme (MEGS), with Dr Tippu S Sheriff and Dr Giorgio Chianello at QMUL, in collaboration with Imperial (London) and the University of Greenwich.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve these resources or ideas for additional biographies that should be included, email Dr Tippu S Sheriff: t.s.sheriff@qmul.ac.uk

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