When I was in sixth grade, my homeroom teacher brought monarch caterpillars into our classroom. One of our homework assignments was to walk around our backyard and find milkweed (the only kind of plant monarch caterpillars eat) to feed our caterpillars. Now, over 25 years later, I still clearly remember the excitement of hunting around in my backyard to find milkweed and checking every day to see the metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly.
You might say that raising monarch caterpillars gave me the bug to want to be a biologist.
An early interest in biology sparks a lifelong dedication
As the years went by, my interest in biology didn’t wane. In college, molecular biology became my primary focus area. During graduate school and beyond, I trained in both molecular biology and the learning sciences, settling into a career in biology education. I taught Non-Majors and Majors Biology while running a research lab dedicated to understanding how people learn biology.
A lack of enthusiasm from students
When I taught Non-Majors Biology, I noticed a concerning trend among my students: All in all, they didn’t like biology.
That may be too gentle. The comments from an “introduce yourself” activity that I use in the first week of class revealed that most of my students were either afraid to take a biology class, thought the subject was boring, or didn’t think they could succeed at it. Some people even flat-out admitted they hated the subject.
Now, as a self-professed biology nerd, those comments took me aback. As a learning sciences researcher, I wanted to know why there were such pervasive negative feelings about biology. As a biology educator, I wanted to know what to do about it.
A common point of view
Negative perceptions around biology are common, driving people away from engaging with the big biology issues we face today. Lack of knowledge around scientific topics can make it easier to be duped by misinformation, leading one to potentially make decisions against their own best interests. We see this with issues ranging from climate change to vaccines.
Acknowledging that biology is all around us is important not only because it enriches our lives, but because it’s also important to the health and welfare of our society. Biology is everywhere, and engagement starts with reimagining how we think about biology’s role in our lives. It’s about reigniting wonder and emphasizing relevance. It’s about giving students the chance to learn biological material in a way that makes sense to them. When we start to make connections between the classroom and the real world, it becomes easier to engage with bigger concepts and ideas.
Connecting biology to the everyday
Let’s look at hand washing, as an example of how to relate lipid biochemistry to our everyday routines.
Okay, fine, we all know we’re supposed to do it, and yet nasty microorganisms like norovirus (transmitted mainly by the fecal-oral route, ahem) still tend to spread rampantly. Isn’t hand sanitizer sufficient? Or Lysol? The soap dispenser is out again — does it matter?
According to the Centers for Disease Control, hand sanitizer doesn’t work well against norovirus. Think of norovirus as wearing a protective coat — hand sanitizer doesn’t penetrate, and since the virus doesn’t readily dry out on surfaces, it remains ready to infect on the surface of the skin. In order to effectively remove the virus, you have to use soap and water and rub your hands together. Why?
Soap particles have water-repellant and water-loving components. Those water-repellant portions, combined with rubbing your hands back in forth, causes the virus to break apart. The soap particles surround the bits of virus, and water washes it away.
If I talked about the structure of soap as a fatty acid with a carboxylic acid functional group, sodium ion, and fatty acid tail, and how with other fatty acids, it forms a micelle in water, students’ eyes would glaze over. On the contrast, breaking down the basics of why hand-washing works to illustrate the biochemistry proves far more interesting.
Impacting student perceptions
When biological principles are applied to our daily lives, they become inherently interesting. When students realize they can understand the biological principles behind their daily experiences, it becomes accessible. By viewing biology through a personal lens, students learn to appreciate rather than hate the subject.
When students see biology everywhere, as an integral part of their lives, they are more likely to engage. As they engage, they realize they can understand biology, and that it’s actually interesting.
Think back to the opening example — my homework was looking in my backyard for milkweed to feed to the classroom caterpillars. Biology was relatable and accessible and that made it exciting. That’s the driving framework behind my biology education practice. I always consider the relevancy in students’ lives as the main touchstone in my teaching practice.
What is something that you can do in your classroom to bring your own excitement about the material in? What kind of real-world examples can you bring into your classroom? Come tell me about it on social media!
Written by Dr. Melanie Peffer,Teaching Assistant Professor and Research Scientist Level II at the University of Colorado Boulder, and author of “Biology for Life: A Guide to Our Living World,” 1e.
Interested in this first edition text for your biology course? Look for Peffer’s first edition text, “Biology for Life: A Guide to Our Living World,” 1ecoming spring, 2025, and check out other available biology titles on the discipline page.
The new first edition of “Discovering Engineering Design in the 21st Century: An Activities-Based Approach” is a practical and applied introduction to the engineering needs of today’s world. By integrating practical activities, sustainability principles, and cross-disciplinary insights, this companion guide prepares students to think critically and creatively about the challenges they will face as engineers in the modern era.
A Hands-On Approach to Learning
Research shows that engineering students learn best when they can connect theoretical concepts to real-world applications. Written by Professor Brad Striebig of James Madison University, this curriculum-based intro engineering text bridges the gap between foundational knowledge, traditional engineering skills, and hands-on experiential learning. The author focuses on applying engineering principles to real-world design and problem analysis. It includes specific step-by-step examples and case studies for solving complex conceptual and design problems in several different engineering fields.
This textbook applies the principles of sustainable design with real-world issues in both developed and developing countries, serving as a companion guide for students as they embark on their exploration into the engineering profession. It emphasizes key steps in engineering solutions, including translating societal needs into infrastructures, products, practices, and processes. It also communicates the long-term impacts of these solutions to society and works to prepare the next generation of engineers with the breadth of skills needed to address complex environmental problems.
Through integrative analysis and sustainable design methods, students will engage with these essential concepts chapter by chapter, as they engage with the pressing issues facing this generation of engineers.
Meet the Author
Professor Brad Striebig, Professor of Engineering, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Dr. Striebig earned his PhD from Pennsylvania State University. He is a founding professor of the engineering program at James Madison University and previously taught engineering at Gonzaga University and Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Striebig has served as editor on major journals in environmental engineering and sustainable development. He has led major, funded, award-winning research activities focused on working with developing communities and natural treatment systems. He has published two textbooks on sustainability and engineering and has authored over 100 technical publications, including several book chapters, numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, and peer-reviewed conference proceedings.
Contributing Authors
The collaborative effort behind this text features contributions from esteemed colleagues at James Madison University. Together, these authors bring a multidisciplinary perspective, ensuring that the text addresses the diverse and interconnected challenges facing today’s engineers.
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Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics Professor, Dr. Carlotta Berry knows her online presence can fit as many of her identities as needed to support her goals to “diversify STEM by being a STEM communicator.” And, to share her black STEM romance books and her children’s book There’s A Robot! Series with the world.
In this featured interview, we talk about what it’s like to be a professor with an extensive online presence with profiles on many platforms and multiple websites. Dr. Berry knows that when she shows up online, when she creates strong black women characters for her books who care about STEM, she helps create “what I really wanted to see when I was an engineering student: was Black women professors in engineering.” We also talk about writing her Black STEM romance books, Elevated Inferno and Breaking Point: Chandler’s Choice and what it’s like to be a professor and an author online. Read her bio.
Meet Dr. Carlotta Berry
Jennifer: Hi everyone, it is Jennifer van Alstyne from The Social Academic podcast where we talk about managing your online presence in academia. Today, I have a featured interview guest I’m so excited about because I’ve been planning this interview for, to be honest, over a year.
Dr. Berry, I’m delighted to have you on The Social Academic podcast. Would you please introduce yourself for people?
Carlotta: Absolutely, my name is Carlotta Berry, PhD and I’m a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Robotics. I’m also the owner of NoireSTEMinist Educational Consulting, a company that I started during the 2020 pandemic. My area of research is robotics and controls. The theme for my company is ‘my STEM is for the streets,’ and my goal is to use robotics to diversify STEM by being a STEM communicator and having a strong presence online and also by doing speaking and writing books and making GIFs and doing lots of things in order to amplify the importance of diversity in STEM and robotics.
Jennifer: The first time I saw you online was a post that you were sharing on Twitter about robotics. It was so visually engaging for me. I was like, “Oh my gosh. I can’t wait to see more from this professor,” even though I don’t know anything about robotics personally. Just having that visual, just seeing who you were as a person made a difference for me.
I’m curious like, what prompted you to get on social media and to create an online presence for yourself?
Carlotta: I’m gonna tell you, the pandemic was a crazy place. So my initial beginning to social media was actually back in 2013. I had gone to a women’s leadership conference and Paul Carrick Brunson spoke. Paul Carrick Brunson was a famous guy who was a matchmaker actually. And he had gotten famous because he was on Oprah Winfrey. And he came and spoke to this room full of women engineering academics who were all professors. And he said, “I went and looked for the clout score for most of you and most of you’re at zero.” And basically what that means is that we did not have any kind of online presence. And he was saying, “If you’re gonna be the thought leaders of tomorrow, you have to understand that your work has to impact people beyond the ivory tower, beyond conferences, beyond paywall journals.” At that time, I started my social media. I think I just started a Twitter account around 2013, but I never really did anything with it.
Then in 2020, thank God, I got approved to go on sabbatical right before the pandemic struck. So I was going on sabbatical anyway. And once we were all home all day and you can only do but so much, I started playing on social media.
What I realized is that every time I was posting something, I think I had maybe like a thousand followers or maybe 2,000 in 2020, even after seven years on social media, and it just started growing and people loved when I put engineering and robotics quizzes. They’d be like, “I don’t know what any of this is, but put another one.” And I thought it was so crazy.
I like to call 2020 my Jerry McGuire moment. It’s like the beginning of Jerry McGuire. He talks about, “I want to be a agent but I want to learn to be a sports agent in a new way.” And my Jerry McGuire moment was, “If I really wanna diversify STEM and the thing I really wanted to see when I was an engineering student was Black women professors in engineering, then how can I increase my visibility for other people and not for me?”
And social media is great. My STEM is for the Streets. Where more are the streets than social media? So I started on Twitter, and the way I ended up other places beyond Twitter, ’cause Twitter really was my pocket because I didn’t really understand social media. I still don’t understand Instagram. No clue how Instagram works.
A parent said to me, “My daughter is a teenager and she is really into STEM. You gotta go where they are. You gotta get over on TikTok.” And I was like, “Ugh.” You know, ’cause TikTok has kind of a bad rap. I went on TikTok and I wanna say within one year, I had gotten the same number of followers that I got on Twitter after 10 years.
Jennifer: Amazing.
Carlotta: TikTok is the jam.
Jennifer: We’re drawn to you. And TikTok allowed more people to see you probably than anything like Twitter or even Instagram with its more limited kind of reach to people. Oh, they were just waiting for you.
Carlotta: They were, I mean, it’s a total different kind of dynamic. So I can truly say that Twitter and TikTok are really where my pocket is. Everyone else is just kind of there. And that all came from, I went to a branding workshop about a year or so ago and I don’t remember her name unfortunately but she said, “You need to make sure that you at least park your name on any platform that you may eventually have some impact on. Because the worst thing you want to happen is that your brand grows and then somebody else takes your username because you never parked it and they do something inappropriate with it.” And so that’s kind of how I ended up with the same username on all these different platforms even if they don’t get as much attention as that one. Because I remember her saying that like, I have a NoireSTEMinist.com website. She’s like, “You need to have a website with your name.” So I now have a pointer from my name to that website, and that just came from that advice from that woman.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that. So it sounds like having an online presence was something that you wanted to be able to reach people in the streets, to be able to reach people. But it was also something that you realized was valuable for yourself as a researcher, as a professor, and just as a person, like a human being. It sounds like that, almost like that comment from the family member of the high school student.
Carlotta: Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer: How you realize that there were a ton of people waiting to hear from you, that were younger.
Carlotta: If you build it, they will come. But you have to build it in the right place, right? So I had to go where they are, you know. They now think Twitter and Facebook and maybe even Instagram to a certain extent are a little bit, you know, still and crusty. Which is interesting because when I first started teaching my students, Facebook was the place to be. Then probably 2013 or so, it was Twitter. I don’t know when Instagram was hot. Some of my students are on Instagram still, but now some of them are also on TikTok. So it’s just interesting.
I do do a lot of cross-posting and cross-pollinating just so that I can have maximum impact. But like I said, I’m trying to invest mostly in now Instagram and TikTok because we’re just not sure how much longer Twitter’s gonna be here.
Trolling, racism, and responding to hate on social media
Jennifer: I hear that. Now let me ask, it sounds like you’re on a lot of platforms, which one do you like personally enjoy the most?
Carlotta: Crazy as it may sound is still Twitter.
Jennifer: Oh! Okay.
Carlotta: Yeah. Despite the fact that they still have a lot more trolling, a lot more ads, a lot more racist. I actually get the trolling being a Black woman in STEM, having a PhD in my bio, I have probably been trolled on all, actually all of the platforms for someone questioning my credentials, talking about affirmative action, diversity hires and all that. It even happened on LinkedIn as crazy as that may sound.
None of them are safe, but I think Twitter is probably the worst for that. Where you know they just wanna come in and question you, like, are you really a doctor? And I tell them, “Yeah. Maybe I did get my degree from affirmative action, but I have it. Do you have one?” Yeah, because they kind of expect you to get defensive like, “Oh my God, somebody gave you a chance, so you don’t deserve it.” I got a chance and my mama did not have to cut my face on a lacrosse crew captain to do it, you know? So I mean, you know, you just have to get them.
I probably get more of that on Twitter than any other platform. But I like to say I’m a troll take down queen.
My vision for trolls is I’m going to keep going at you until I make you block me. So far I’m batting 1000 and have been since 2020. pic.twitter.com/TTkJIeNBnw
— Dr. Carlotta Berry, PhD #NoireSTEMinist® (@DrCABerry) August 26, 2022
“I’m a troll take down queen.“
Jennifer: You’re a troll take down queen. I love that. What do you do to take down trolls? What do you do to protect yourself in this situation?
Carlotta: What they want you to do is to get upset, and they also want you to block them and run and hide. And depending on if I have a deadline, like I had one when I’m on deadline, like if I have papers due or I got grading to do, I got to get ready for class, I do block them and move on.
If I have a little bit of time in my day, I will GIF and meme the teeth out of you. And a lot of times they block me first. And at that point I’m like, “Troll 101, baby. You blocked me.” But yeah.
Jennifer: Interesting!
Carlotta: And then I noticed that once I start coming back at them, I’ll start getting comments like, “But you’re a professor. What kind of professor acts like this? How do you think your school would feel? How do you think your boss would feel they knew?”
Okay, first of all, I am tenured, and I am a full professor, but a lot of my colleagues follow me on social media as well as my school follows me. So if you are so concerned, feel free to do that.
I had someone on TikTok also threatened to screenshot a video or something and send it to my school. I don’t believe there’s anything I do that anybody at my university really cares about.
But if you think that that’s going to scare me out of responding to your ignorance, then you got another think coming.
Jennifer: Yeah, professors are reported all the time for things that happen on social media, even in person that are recorded on video and their universities often are like, “Thanks for sending that to us.” And then they don’t really do anything with it the vast majority of the time.
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve gotten so many threats, especially reporting to your employer. I really like your response. It actually sounds like you approach responding to them from a very empowered place of knowing yourself, knowing who your real friends are, and who your real supporters are.
Carlotta: Absolutely.
Jennifer: That is beautiful. Thanks for sharing that with me.
Carlotta: Thank you, I was gonna also say, you know, lemme tell you, when I knew reporting doesn’t do anything: there was a guy at a university and I cannot remember where it was anymore, but he was just tweeting things like, ‘this is why women shouldn’t be in STEM’ and ‘women shouldn’t be in the science classroom because they are not smart enough’ and all of that.
He was saying some horrible misogynistic things about women in STEM and all of these women scientists and engineers like me underneath were tagging the university, reporting him to the university, et cetera.
Eventually the university released a statement, “We are aware of the statements of one of our adjunct or endowed or emeritus professors. We have heard you. We’ve gotten the comments. He’s done this for years. You always report. However, we wanna make it clear he’s emeritus and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
I’m sitting here like, “If this white guy can go on here saying all kind of misogynistic stuff and nothing can happen? Then the fact that me promoting diversity in STEM is bothering somebody, then I know nothing’s gonna happen from that.”
Jennifer: Hmm. So you have all of these profiles, it sounds like you’ve got trolled on every platform that you’ve been on. What prompted you to have so many profiles for different things? I get that you went to the branding workshop, but you don’t just have your name, you have NoireSTEMinist, and I think you have Carlotta Ardell. Is that right?
Carlotta: I do, I do. Yes, so what happened was also during the pandemic, not only did I launch my company, but I also started writing Black STEM romance novels.
I just started brainstorming all the different ways to normalizing Black, oh, thank you, Black women in STEM, Black women in engineering. And my mentor, my writing mentor, ’cause it was not an easy transition from technical engineering journal type writing to fictional writing, understanding view, understanding visual writing and all of that. And my writing mentor was like, “I think your messages are getting crossed up. I know everything relates back to your primary, but you don’t want your romance books getting mixed up with your technical papers. You don’t want people going to learn about your books and they’re on your professor site.”
That was her recommendation, to disconnect the two. And so that’s why I came up with a pen name Carlotta Ardell, which is my middle name, so that if you search on that, only the romance books come up. But if you search on my surname, then my textbook will come up or my journal papers that come up, et cetera.
Then that just immediately transitioned to, you need to have dedicated websites, channels, et cetera for book stuff. So I’m not always the best at it and I do most of the managing of my stuff, which is why I’m crazy most of the time. But I do try to dedicate, if at all possible, the Carlotta Ardell stuff to the Black STEM romance, NoireSTEMinist to the STEMy stuff, the educator stuff, and then my others like my personal Twitter or my personal Instagram. I’m liable to say anything on that one. But I’m not always best about doing that.
But I also had to at some point realize I can’t do it all. And so I do have a virtual assistant and she does a little bit of the managing for me, not that much, but she helps a little bit with content creation.
“Canva has been a game changer, designing things in Canva and automating posts in Canva.“
But Canva has been a game changer, designing things in Canva and automating posts in Canva. Even though I know it’s frowned upon and a lot of people don’t, I like it. AI art has also been a game changer for me because it’s very, very difficult to find little Black girls building robots, little Black girls doing electronics, Black women in research labs.
I’m able to en mass create the vision for the world that I want to see. And through that media, I was able to get an Afro-futurism talk at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. So because I started generating this content of little Black girls and brown girls being androids and playing with robots, I got the Afro-futurism talk.
Even though I’ve gotten trolled about my AI art as well, it has already led to some opportunities for me.
Carlotta: But yeah, so the GIFs was the same thing. The GIFS came about also 20, I’m telling you 2020 and 2021, the pandemic sabbatical year was crazy. I hated that whenever I wanted to make a reaction to somebody’s post, I would have to scroll forever to find Black teacher, Black woman engineer, Black STEM, Black professor, Black woman laughing, there were like three or four people.
So that’s why I really started making the GIFs because I could never find GIFs that represented me. And so that’s where that came from. And I don’t do it so much anymore, but I have found that some of them have become relatively popular. Like there’s a frustration one that I made that is like extremely popular. People will sometimes DM me a message if somebody used my meme or my GIF in a response. They’d be like, “Look, this person used one of yours.”
Jennifer: That’s great. When you first created your GIFs, did you have that kind of idea or notion that a lot of people would then be using them? You created them for yourself, it felt like personal, but like now other people are using them. What are your thoughts on that?
Carlotta: A hundred percent I did not. It was completely for me. In fact I was on Twitter venting like, where are the GIFs for people who look like me? Where are the GIFs for people that act like me? Where are my GIFs? And it’s been a few times I’ve tweeted something and somebody reached out to me, and I think GIPHY may have responded or GIPHY identity responded. I think GIPHY identity must be maybe their diverse voices channel. And I think they responded and said something make a GIPHY channel and make your GIFs.
I honestly did not know it was that easy. I mean, I already make videos in Canva. I already make videos for my class in Camtasia. Making a GIF really is as easy as having a picture or a video converting it to a GIF and uploading it to that website. I mean, it’s so easy and I don’t think people realized that. And so once I did it, there were a couple of people who reached out and was like, “Can you make me one?” So if you look at my GIPHY channel, there’s probably about three or four other Black women in STEM on there. ‘Cause I don’t think anybody realized how simple it was. But it was me venting in a tweet where somebody responded and was like, “You know, anybody can do this. You just have to make a Giphy channel and get it approved.” Really? I mean, that easy outta debt that done it years ago. Who knew?
Jennifer: It sounds like a lot. So you’ve made your own GIFs in the past, you have all of these channels, you’ve got the websites, you do have some support with your assistant, which is amazing.
Leaving Spill, and considering other social media platforms
Jennifer: But before we started recording, you actually said like it feels messy. Like it feels like a lot. And so I’m curious, like what’s something like a decision that you’ve made for your online presence that you probably wouldn’t make again, you like, wouldn’t repeat it, or wish you could take it back?
Carlotta: I think when people kept saying Twitter was dying and there was a mad rush to other platforms, I probably would’ve slowed down because now that I’ve opened them up, I probably feel kind of obligated to maintain them even though I don’t post a lot. Like I made a post news site. My post news site may have like five things on it. I made a Bluesky site. My Bluesky may have like five or 10 on it. I got on Mastodon. Mastodon is kind of a different kind of place. The format is kind of different. It’s kind of weird. And I have a Spoutible.
But to be honest, if I would’ve just slowed down and been like, everybody’s making a mad rush for the doors on Twitter, I’m not going, I probably would’ve made them.
One thing I made and I did reverse this decision, I made a Spill. Spill was the one that was invitation only and they sent out the little codes and pretty early on, I got a Spill invitation and I went on there. And what I did not like is Spill is visual. It’s more you post images than words.
I was over there sharing some of the same kind of content that I share everywhere ’cause you know, my brand doesn’t change just because I changed platforms. And I started becoming, they were like, “You’re trolling the timeline. You’re spamming the timeline. You don’t engage right. You’re not doing it right.” And for the first time ever, I deleted myself off of a social media account because I felt Spill was a little bit too judgy.
And I’m like, if I’m gonna be criticized, critiqued, and judged, I can go read my course evaluations at work. And you know, in my time of relaxation, I don’t get on social media to be critiqued and criticized about how I do it.
You know, when a troll does it on Twitter, I just slam ’em down. But when I did it on Spill, you know, this person’s saying stuff like “I’m trying to educate her,” “I’m trying to tell her.” And then other people started popping in like, “Well, she just doesn’t know.”
I said, “Well, I know what I am gonna know. I’m about to delete this. That’s what I am gonna know.” And I actually contacted Spill on Twitter and said, “I don’t think you’re ever gonna be successful because you’re letting the members of your community police the way people engage.” And if you don’t want people here, just say you don’t want people here. I thought the whole goal for a social media community was to build community. And I was just like, it was just so negative.
But similarly with Mastodon, I could post the same engineering professor quizzes and engineering STEM content that I put on Twitter or somewhere else and people will engage or just click on things and be like, “I have no clue.”
On Mastodon, I have people coming underneath and trying to, well, actually this is what your question should say or well, actually this is how we, almost every time, and I’m like. So it’s kind of like, interesting to me how you can post the same thing in multiple places and get completely different reactions. Mastodon is not so negative that I’m going to leave it necessarily.
I just think it’s a little irritating that they have a bunch of elite type of intellectuals over there. Some of them who want to constantly try to tell you how to do things like, “I’m not sure that was the correctly framed question and that your multiple choice options are the best ones.”
This is for fun, honey. And to introduce people to STEM. This ain’t my classroom and you are not a peer reviewer. Get over yourself.
Jennifer: Tell me a little bit about NoireSTEMinist and who it’s supporting. I’d love to hear more about your business.
Carlotta: The business was started because, also during the pandemic, is once my social media presence exploded, I started getting contacted and pinged a lot for speaking engagements. I didn’t mind doing the first couple of talks, ’cause academics and professors, we speak for free all the time at conferences, on panels.
But I started having people asking me to speak in person and online to events that might be 500+ people. Sometimes at events, they were charging people to attend but had no budget for the speaker. Or, they had money to fly me there, but nothing to pay me for preparing my slides, leaving my classes, and wanted to share the slides and the recording after I left.
Okay, I’m now giving you my pearls. I’m giving you my intellectual labor.
It took me six years to get this PhD. You count that plus the 13 years of K through 12, that is like 19 or 20 years of education that you’re now asking for for free.
That was my original motivation for starting my business. I had to find a way to monetize my intellectual property because people will use you up dry if you let them.
Now, I do most of my free labor through the organizations. I help co-found: Black in Engineering and Black in Robotics. We do robotics workshops for low cost or no cost for people in the community.
I also do STEM workshops and webinars for adults and kids through my business. I do speaking engagements through my business and I’m also currently the visiting scientist at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. So I do STEM activities for them as well.
NoireSTEMinist is now taking her work to the streets. And so I take things that I give my students for their high price tuition and my salary and I scale them down into bite-sized chunks for anybody who wants to get or know a little bit more about STEM.
Jennifer: I love that it’s like your business is enabling you to actually help more people for free by allowing you to produce more content, reach more audiences and having a way to like monetize that so it can continue to do so in the future. I love it.
Carlotta: My business is me, right? So NoireSTEMinist is me. So basically, my business is me doing what I was doing for free and doing what I normally do anyway, but now setting it up into a model where I can ideally start making money in my sleep and leave a legacy for my daughter. And that was the main difference, yes.
Writing Black STEM romance novels
Jennifer: That’s amazing. Oh, that felt really powerful. Thank you for sharing that with me. Oh, okay. So who should definitely be reading these books? Because your books are awesome. When I read this, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this character is just so strong.” And someone who thinks about herself first in a beautiful way because she cares about her education, because she cares about her family, ’cause she values herself.
I’m curious. Tell me more about the books. Tell me about being an author online while having like these multiple identities and multiple hats. Cause it’s all you, right?
Carlotta: Absolutely.
Yeah, the intersectionality, when I became a full professor, I gave a full presentation on the intersectional identities of being a Black woman in STEM, being a mother, being a Black person, being a woman, loving romance novels, loving to cross stitch and saying, “Why can’t these all intersect in that ball of being multidisciplinary, intersectional, interdisciplinary?”
So where this started is that during the pandemic as well, I was chatting with a couple of my colleagues in Black in Engineering, all Black women engineering professors, and we always talk about that MacGyver and Dilbert and Sheldon get all the STEM love online.
“How can we devise a way to start getting more Black women in STEM marketed correctly?“
And so we were like TV shows, comedy series, web series, web comics, and we had just thought maybe we start with books, get those to a certain point and then try to mark it out.
But it was really all about marketing. The romance came later. Originally, and we were called the Catalyst Chronicles Crew. Then the pandemic started to end and we started to go back to work and it became very difficult.
But I didn’t wanna give it up. I now had this social media presence. I had already started honing this fictional writing skill. And the first book, Elevated Inferno was actually birthed out of Instagram of all places. That was a young lady who got stuck in an elevator and it went viral because she was recording her experience. And when the doors opened, there was this gorgeous firefighter there. Of course, everybody’s like, “Ah, love interest. Love interest, love connection!”
And it went viral.
Then, he creates a Instagram account. He didn’t even have one. He said his sister contacted him and said, “do you know you’re going viral on Instagram right now because of you rescuing that young lady in the elevator?”
So he comes on and goes, “I wanted to create an Instagram account and say thank you for everyone and for all the love, and I’m married and have a son.”
I thought it was so hilarious. And so I told my friend, I said, “Okay, I know what my first book’s gonna be. I wanna use this story for my first book except he’s not gonna be married with a child.” And so that was where it was birthed.
I always knew all the women were gonna have some relationship to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). And I want all of them to have some kind of meet cute, kind of crazy way to meet. Because I want it to be romance first, but I want the STEM to be injected in a way so that someone doesn’t feel like they’re being preached to, doesn’t feel so high level, they can’t follow or understand it.
The greatest compliment I have gotten is from people who’ve said, “I don’t read romance, I don’t like romance novels, and I’m not a STEM person, but I liked your book” because that means I hit on the right note.
Because I’m the sneak attack, right? I’m proselytizing the STEM in such a way you don’t even know it hits you. You finish the book and you’re like, “Did they STEM me?”
Jennifer: I love it, well, I’m not in STEM. I’m a poet. I’m not a fiction writer. But I love romance novels and I loved your book. So pick up your copy of Elevated Inferno.
Carlotta: Thank you, and because I’m an engineer and my students have found my books, even with a different name as well as some of my colleagues at engineering conferences, they are appropriate for teenagers.
I’ve had colleagues and students talk about, are they the nasty books? You know, this is not 60 degrees of gray or whatever it’s called. These are your high school run of the mill 16+ romance novels.
We fade to black. We make, you know, we allude to the scenes because I’m an engineer and an academic and a professor and my students have found and do read my books. I can’t be talking to them in front of class if, you know, they just done finished reading steam and steamy.
Jennifer: Oh, I love that. Well, I was a writer and went to school for writing. And so a lot of my professors wrote some steamy scenes in their books and it was always a little awkward. That’s very thoughtful of you.
Carlotta: Book two is Moses. Moses was actually in book one. He helped Reese connect with Monet on social media in book one. And book two is all about Moses, who’s a womanizer and a player. And Chandler is a nursing student. So she’s serious about her business. She lost her father some years ago and had a little bit of a detour but she’s on the right track. She’s getting her degree. She’s about her business. And Moses gives off straight player vibes when she meets him. And she’s like, “Uh-uh. I’m not even trying to go there with him.”
He’s a player, but he’s persistent. So eventually, she relents, gives him her number and they start dating. And she tells him, I just don’t have time. I don’t have time for any foolishness. So if we’re gonna date, I wanna be in a situationship. You know, I’m not even gonna put myself out there like that. We know from the very beginning, we are just having a summer fling. We’re flinging it. It’s all good. But he’s great, you know. He’s a great guy.
Even though he’s a player, he’s not a dog. So they have a great summer. And at the end of the summer she goes, “I wanna try this for real. I wanna stop playing at dating and I want to date date.”
And he’s just like, “Uh-uh, you knew what this was.” He wasn’t ready. And so they have a horrible, horrible breakup. It gets really, really ugly. And Chandler walks away. And Moses goes, “Wait a minute. I like her, but she’s gone. She’s gone.”
I don’t wanna give the whole book away, but she goes on with her life. She makes some decisions and does some things in her life. And then some years later, he gets in a motorcycle accident. She’s now a visiting nurse. She does like concierge nursing and he ends up being her nurse. He’s bedridden ’cause he’s broken his leg all the way completely. And so that’s how they come back together. That’s where ‘Breaking Point’ comes from. She reached her breaking point when he couldn’t settle down with her. He reaches his breaking point when he breaks his leg and she comes back into his life.
Jennifer: I love it. I mean, I think you gave a little bit away about the book, but the kind of stuff that’s like making everyone gonna wanna read it. I love it.
Jennifer: Tell me a little bit about the covers. I know, I think I remember that I saw you used AI art for the covers because–
Carlotta: I did not. So that’s one of my challenges. I know you know I do presentations on bias and AI, bias in STEM, bias in robotics. I have one next week. So because of that, I use AI art for marketing, but I don’t use AI, yeah, I don’t use AI art for anything that I want to copyright and sell because you don’t really know what the engine for the AI art is. You don’t really know how it’s being used.
I don’t wanna accidentally ever try to market or sell something that’s somebody else’s work.
So on my website, I think any of the AI art, a lot of it I generate is like 50 cents or a dollar, just whatever the work took for me to put it up. I use real stock photos for the book covers and then I hire somebody to put them together.
The first one my brother did, ’cause he’s a graphic artist. The second one is a stock photos and I just had somebody put it together.
And I don’t want AI art for it, but because my stuff is so very specific, it’s very hard to find stock photos of little kids, Black and brown little kids, building robots, playing with robots, et cetera. It’s just not a lot of them.
So I don’t wanna do AI art, but I gotta find an artist who’s reasonably priced ’cause I’m an independent author and publisher. I don’t have an agent who I can pay to bring my visions to life.
I don’t mind using the AI art for stuff on social media and showing it off. But all of my books need to have either real artists or real stock photos and stuff.
Book three is actually written as well. I’m hoping to get it out this summer. I’m just so crazy busy. I need to get it edited right now. But yeah, this book, I’ve now, because I have a writing mentor, I’ve gone from pandemic taking a year to get a book written.
“I can now write a book in about 35 days and then it takes another two or three months to do the editing, which is where I am right now.“
Jennifer: My mind is blown. That is some work, wow.
Carlotta: Yeah, I just, it’s hard work, but because I’m a professor and busy, I have to get the idea and get it out like that or it won’t get done.
It took so long the first time because I just didn’t know the mechanics of writing. I didn’t know how fictional book writing, I didn’t know how to lay a book out. I didn’t know about changing perspective. And if you notice my books have the male, female thing now, the second one, I just didn’t know how to do that. And so learning a lot of those things really helped me go faster. The editing is what’s slowing me down right now ’cause when I go back to work, it’s all about the students, you know.
Wikipedia and how to connect with Dr. Carlotta Berry
Jennifer: What’s it like to talk about your book online? Do people from your university like, know that you write these books? I’m curious about what it’s like to embrace both of those identities at the same time.
Carlotta: They do, and I love it. I actually, because I was on NPR a couple of weeks ago, one of the young ladies at my school, her parents heard my interview, bought her the books, shipped them to her at school, and she came to my office and had me sign them. And I think it’s really an honor. I had some young ladies who asked to borrow and read the book. And because I didn’t want them to keep taking my one copy outta my office, I had talked, my school library has now purchased copies of my books so that if they wanna read the romance novels, they can go check it out at the school library.
Jennifer: I love it.
Carlotta: But yeah, I think it’s really important for them to know that I practice what I preach and that if I say I promote diversity in STEM and all of those things, then your professor has to do more than just spout those things in the classroom.
I tell them all the time, I’m a STEM communicator, I’m a superstar on social media. And then when I’m not here, you know that I’m off doing an interview or I’m off giving a talk or I’m off doing something important. ‘Cause you know, sometimes they’re like, “Where are you going and why are you going all the time?”
The work I do is important. What I do for you is important. What I do when I’m away from you is just as important. And so helping them to understand that it’s important. And that I tell ’em, “I’m not like any of your other professors, you know.” And I think that’s a good thing.
You know, being the only Black woman engineering professor at my university, the things that I do impact a lot of people.
If I keep all of that in my little box, in my little corner of the world, I’m doing it wrong. I like to say to whom it is given much is required. And if I don’t let my blessing bless other people, then why do I have it?
Jennifer: Hmm, hmm, beautiful, beautiful. Okay, my last question.
What do you most want people to know about you or remember about you when they find you online? What’s that thing that you really want them to bring with them to whatever’s next?
Carlotta: I want them to know that my passion for diversifying STEM is infectious. And I want it to be so exciting to them that they wanna join me on the journey. Whether that’s getting some kids excited about STEM, getting themselves excited by STEM, showing some little kid how to program a robot, helping somebody get excited about being creative, being a designer, being innovative, being curious. That’s all there it is.
Jennifer: Beautiful. Dr. Carlotta Berry, it’s been amazing to have you on The Social Academic. Is there anything that you’d like to add before we wrap up?
Jennifer: Here’s both those books again. Be sure to pick up a copy. I will be linking to those in the interview. How can people find you online after this?
That was something else that happened during the pandemic. There was a Wikiathon to get more Black STEM and Black scientists, engineers and physicians online. And so we did it through the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
One day, we had a Wikiathon and we were all gonna go make Wikipedia pages. I was gonna make a page for somebody. They were gonna make a page for me. Imagine our shock when we went to Wikipedia and somebody had already made me a page. I have no idea who did it. So this was March of 2021 and somebody had made me a page back in September of 2020 and I didn’t even know it. And so I’m going on there.
But I made other people’s Wiki pages ’cause once again, you pay it forward. But I don’t have any idea who made my Wikipedia page. It’s crazy.
But yeah, so really Googling. If you just put in my name, things come up. But probably the easiest is NoireSTEMinist. And I actually purposely selected that word because I wanted it to be something that wasn’t a common term because I was able to trademark it. And also because of that, if you type that in, everything that comes up is me. So NoireSTEMinist.com. And also @DrCABerry on most social social media. NoireSTEMinist is on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook. And then there’s author Carlotta Ardell as well as on Facebook and also my website.
Jennifer: Amazing. Well, Dr. Berry, thank you so much for joining me on The Social Academic. And thank you to everyone who’s been listening to this interview.
Go and pick up a copy of Elevated Inferno, or Breaking Point: Chandler’s Choice. And be sure to follow Dr. Berry on social media. Her videos and posts are amazing and you will not regret it.
Dr. Carlotta Berry is a professor, author, researcher, mentor, role model, and prolific speaker. In her efforts to increase the number of women and historically marginalized and minoritized students earning degrees in computer science, computer, electrical, and software engineering at her university, she co-founded the Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity professional development, networking, and scholarship program.
In 2020, to achieve her mission to diversify STEM by bringing robotics to people and bringing people to robotics, she launched her business, NoireSTEMinist educational consulting. She also co-founded Black In Engineering and Black In Robotics to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and justice in STEM. Her innovative strategies to normalize seeing Black women in STEM including performing robot slam poetry, writing Black STEM Romance novels, conducting robotics workshops, creating open-source robots, and using social media to educate the world about engineering and robotics.
On January 21, President Biden announced several agency programs at the Department of State (DOS) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to help international STEM students and researchers access certain non-immigrant visas to allow them to study and work in the United States. The programs aim to admit and retain more international scholars to help advance STEM competitiveness in the U.S.
Department of State
The first announced program was DOS’s Early Career STEM Research Initiative. The initiative will facilitate engagement between J-1 visa recipients coming to the U.S. to participate in STEM research with host organizations, including businesses. Additionally, the department also announced new guidance to allow J-1 visa recipients in STEM fields to obtain up to 36 months of optional practical training. According to the announcement, the guidance will be applicable for exchange students in the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 academic years, so long as the students meet certain academic training requirements.
Department of Homeland Security
Of significance, the president’s announcement also included a decision by DHS to add 22 new fields of study in the STEM Optional Practical Training (OPT) program through the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP). The program permits F-1 students earning bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in certain STEM fields to remain in the United States for up to 36 months to complete OPT after earning their degrees. DHS issued a notice in the Federal Register announcing the specific fields of study added to the designated list of STEM fields.
Additionally, the United States Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued guidance “to clarify how USCIS evaluates evidence to determine eligibility for O-1A non-immigrants of extraordinary ability, with a focus on persons in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) fields, as well as how USCIS determines whether an O-1 beneficiary’s prospective work is within the beneficiary’s area of extraordinary ability or achievement.”
CUPA-HR will keep members apprised of any further updates to these programs and any additional policies and guidance documents impacting student visas as released by President Biden and Congress.
(@DrCABerry) 
