 "Photo: Jeremy Northum")
Jacques Richard and his family overcame socioeconomic and sociopolitical oppression to come to the U.S., where he learned English by watching sitcoms.
The senior lecturer in the aerospace engineering department immigrated from Haiti with his family in the early 1970s. At that time, dictator Papa Doc was consolidating power for his son to take over when he died, Richard said.
"The brain drain of Haiti I guess. I came here before I was 10, so I wouldn't remember what that first time was," Richard said. "I don't remember how old I was, but it's been a while."
His family eventually settled in the Boston area and he began to teach himself English through television.
"That wasn't a good way to learn English," Richard said. "In high school, I mean I was always different, but then again I had that problem all the time because I was also younger than anybody else in school. I think it was the language and the age, I was always about a year and a half younger than everyone else."
Richard attended Boston University as an undergraduate. He started out as a physics major intending to go into the aerophysics field, but said it was discouraging because he knew there were more jobs available in aerospace engineering.
"Being in aerospace engineering was where I got more interested in the fluid physics part of aero more than anything else," Richard said.
In 2007, nine out of the 421 faculty members at the Dwight Look College Engineering were black, according to the Office of the Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity.
These statistics are similar across the field of aerospace engineering.
Being one of the few black professors in a university department, let alone being one of the few in an entire field, could be intimidating. But Richard said he's used to it.
"By the time I was at B.U., I was kind of used to being one thing different or another. I was used to being too young in my classes, I was used to being the only one, and the only African-American, the only black in my classes, the foreigner in my class. I was used to a lot of the only 'that' in my classes," Richard said.
He said living in College Station doesn't daunt him either.
"Even coming from the Chicago area, and anywhere else up North I've been, I'm used to kind of being one of the few around. For me this is just like another suburb," Richard said. "I'm kind of used to not expecting to find too many other black faces around. It's not too surprising."
He said many professors do not cover certain topics in lower level classes that were covered in courses when he was an undergraduate.
"It's basically left to the aerospace engineering classes to teach that … I guess they want to spend more time on what students that they're serving in different majors are going to need," Richard said.
Richard suggested aerospace engineering majors take courses outside of what is required by their degree plan. His friends and coworkers from the various institutions he's done research with, including NASA, have told him they wish graduates had a background in statistics for processing data in experiments and linear algebra for computations.
"The entire four years I was there [at Boston University] there was always some engineering math course, but now there's not enough time to fit those in. That's the weird part there's not enough time to fit stuff in, but stuff is being taken out, and yet I always kind of thought the future would have more than I did."
Richard is a faculty mentor in a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, for aerospace engineering, funded by the National Science Foundation. The program focuses on aero-propulsion fluids research.
Richard will be speaking about his research on electric propulsion May 1 as part of the First Friday Lecture Series.
He is preparing his talk assuming an audience of scientists from a variety of fields. He said he hopes they will gain an understanding of his research and its importance.
"I can appreciate a visionary artist seeing how a beautiful painting can emerge from observing a mountain view though I do not paint," Richard said. "I hope others can appreciate how I can envision how to make different objects fly without being aerospace engineers."
The First Friday Lecture Series is a program of the African-American Professional Organization, sponsored by the Division of Research and Graduate Studies. Richard will speak about his research in electric propulsion.
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