Ask Julieanna Richardson about her ScienceMakers project, documenting the work of black scientists, and she has stories to tell.
 

There's the one about a researcher who recently gave a lecture regarding an herbicide that causes male frogs to have female parts.
 

There's another about a roboticist who builds robots that roam the Arctic, studying ice shelves and climate change. And another about a scientist who created a condenser microphone used in cellphones.
 

Richardson is the founder of the HistoryMakers, a nonprofit oral history and video archive project based in Chicago, which she started in 1999 to document and digitize the African-American experience.
 

Her mission with the ScienceMakers focuses exclusively on blacks who work in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Although the ScienceMakers, which began in 2009, is credited with introducing people to little-known scientists, Richardson said the project is also responsible for injecting new life into the HistoryMakers.

Dawn Turner Trice

February 27, 2012

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