As an associate professor of identity and justice in STEM education, Terrell Morton begins his research with a fundamental question: “What does it mean to be a Black person in this space?”
Morton, whose background includes degrees in STEM-related fields, including a master’s degree in neuroscience and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, focuses on how undergraduate Black students find a place in STEM education and schools, and how this even informs where a student sits in class.
His work earned him this year’s Rising Star in Social Sciences award.
“I ask these questions because when we look at the broader landscape of STEM, we know that people who have a literacy connected to those disciplines, even if they don’t major in those disciplines, help drive innovative possibilities,” Morton said.
Having more Black students majoring in highly sought-after STEM fields will strengthen the nation’s competitiveness and help address systemic issues worldwide, he said. Part of his research is on how to build holistic learning spaces that better encourage and meet the needs of all people.
“We are facing these grand challenges, and we know the most innovative solutions come from people who have a diversity of mindsets, backgrounds and experiences,” Morton said. “Right now, we are not doing our best as a nation or as a world. Our learning spaces functionally weed people out.”
Working with his research team, known as the Justice and Joy Squad, he involves faculty, administrators and outside stakeholders such as community members to rethink the structure of higher education.
Among the projects he is leading is one that uses Afrofuturism as a framework to redesign undergraduate biology instruction. He also is exploring how researchers who focus on race can do their work in the current sociopolitical context, and he’s looking at the state of health equity funding in Minority-Serving Institutions.
Morton began his academic career aiming to become a doctor. He later shifted to education and earned his doctorate in education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He credits his tight-knit family’s work in civil rights and community involvement in North Carolina — where his grandfather was a Baptist minister and his mother was a youth development and child care worker — for his drive to advocate for his community.
The desire to pursue a doctorate in education and devote himself to reaching all students came after he began mentoring high school students and volunteering with a high school marching band while earning his master’s in neuroscience.
“I fell in love with working with students directly,” said Morton. “It helped me realize that mentorship and working with students was that thing that was missing for me.”
