Interview with Dr. Carlotta Berry, Professor, Engineer, Mentor—and Romance Novelist!

We're thrilled to share a conversation with Dr. Berry, a professor of engineering at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, about her career and background.

Click on the YouTube video above to view the full video interview.

Happy start of summer, everyone! We are thrilled to be sharing our second interview with guest Dr. Carlotta Berry.

As a reminder, here at Origins, we explore the unique origins stories from the childhoods of leaders in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (also known as STEAM). We’re honored to be welcoming Dr. Berry to Origins today.

Dr. Berry is the Lawrence J. Giacoletto Endowed Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Dr. Berry is passionate about increasing diversity in engineering in order to solve the unique challenges of the world. She is the co-founder of multiple programs: the Rose Building Undergraduate Diversity program, Black in Engineering, and Black in Robotics. Her research interests are in robotics education, interface design, and human-robot interactions. 

Dr. Berry is also a talented author with a wide range of interests. She wrote a textbook called Mobile Robotics for Multidisciplinary Study and is currently working on a novel. 

Dr. Berry is a very accomplished member of the engineering community. She was named a Distinguished Fellow by the American Society of Engineering Education and an IEEE Senior Fellow in 2021, among many other awards and accolades. 

Dr. Berry lives with her husband and daughter in Indiana. We welcome Dr. Berry to Origins and invite her to share with us the touchpoints of her childhood and early career that have led her to where she is today.

Please note this interview has been edited and condensed.

Dr. Natasha Wilson (NW): Welcome, Dr. Berry, to Origins. For those in the audience who don't know, could you give a brief overview of what electrical engineering is and what robotics is?

Dr. Carlotta Berry (CB): Absolutely. In general, an engineer is a person that uses math and science in order to improve things and a process. There's lots of subdisciplines of engineering. I'm an electrical engineer. My subdiscipline is controls. As a controls engineer, I design processes and things to make them work more efficiently or effectively. 

Under controls, I'm actually a robotics engineer. A robot is a machine that is given intelligence with software in order to achieve some task. For example, let’s say I wanted to design a bomb disposal robot. I would design one that works with police officers so that it can safely go and dispose of a bomb in order to keep people safe. Or you have the Roomba, which is the vacuum cleaning robot that drives around and vacuums your house by randomly going around a certain space. 

I do mobile robotics and I do human-robot interaction. That subdiscipline looks at how you design robots that people can effectively use in order to achieve some task. Mine are mobile robots, but some people do humanoid robots. Those are the kind of robots that have faces and a physical embodiment, like a museum tour guide or a virtual receptionist or something like that. 

NW: Oh, excellent explanation. What got you interested specifically in the subfield of human-robot interaction?

CB: I had a class in robotics when I was at Georgia Tech. I really loved that course, but part of my disappointment in that course was that because the robots were so expensive, only the professors and graduate students could touch them. The undergraduate students could design software or do a project on them, and then it would be deployed on the robot. We had to stand behind this glass shield and watch to see if it worked or not. And I was like, boo, this is not fun. 

I had always said when I became an engineering professor, I wanted to design robots. I call it Robotics for the Streets now–robots that any person could interact with to get excited about math, engineering, and science. So that's why I do research in educational robotics or human-robot interaction interfaces, designing ways for people to naturally interface with a mobile robot in order to give it a mission and for it to achieve some kind of task. I want people to be able to see themselves in this field and see themselves doing what I'm doing. That's how we get more women and people of color engaging in it.

I think one of the more frustrating parts is the fact that there are some people who would probably make great roboticists and engineers who were run away or turned away because someone told them that they did not fit the mold. I cannot tell you the number of adults I have encountered or met who said that “I wish I had you as a professor” or “I wish I had known you sooner because I was talked out of this field.”

And I had professors who told me I wasn't meant to be in that space. I also had someone who told me that as well. I just ignored him. 

You start to see bias in technology, bias in STEM, bias in artificial intelligence, because you have a room full of white guys who are doing all of this work, then they deploy something. And then like the one that happened on Twitter, you're like, why are these highly pixelated images all being turned into white male faces? Because the technology was only checked on white males. So that's also a technical issue, not having diverse multidisciplinary voices in the room also affects the quality of the technologies that you can create.

NW: Interesting. So can you tell us some ways in which you have been able to, either through your research or your teaching, to break down some of these walls and these stigmas? 

CB: A big one for me, at my level, is I do presentations on them for people. Education and amplification are really big because sometimes people just don't even realize or recognize things they can't see. A big one is talking to my students and audiences about things like the Coded Bias documentary, which looked at faulty facial recognition systems where some of them did not recognize Black faces at all and Joy Buolamwini had to use a white mask. But now this education and amplification hopefully educated police departments that had started using the same technology in order to track people committing crimes. Two Black men got arrested because it falsely attributed a crime to them based upon matching video cameras from the scene to their driver's license photos. (Editor’s Note: Here’s one such story.) A big way that we can educate people about the bias in technology that now leads to injustice is we have to amplify that. 

Another big one is teaching controls and robotics to my students. Most of the pictures in their textbooks are going to look like white men, so in my robotics class, I named the robots after roboticists, some women, some Black people, et cetera. And I have my students then go research who these people are. Developing this appreciation for diverse voices hopefully will carry them into their future career so that when they're in a room, they will make those kinds of considerations of, have we tested this on a big enough population? Have we made sure that the user testing didn't have all of just one demographic? And I always say it's not just diversity in race and gender, but also ability. Is this biased against people who have disabilities? What about people who may think a little differently? 

NW: Definitely. And when you're working in this space and you're talking to companies about diversity within the workforce, what are some important things to keep in mind?

CB: One of the ways you can make sure that they have a community of support is you can do things like cluster hiring. 

You cluster hire so that there is a community of support. You get a critical mass of people of color there. And then you could talk about ways to support them, like giving them a dedicated mentor or someone that can talk to them about things that maybe they don't feel comfortable talking about at that university—maybe someone at another university, building that network of support for them. Understanding that you're not just bringing someone in to check a box, but you're bringing someone in to help develop them professionally. Do they feel supported? Do they feel developed? And that you actually value them as an employee? As opposed to just saying, okay, we actually have hired a Black engineer. Now our work here is done. Is that person happy? Do they feel like they're being mentored and supported and developed? That takes a continuous conversation.

NW: Excellent. What is something that you wish others understood about what you do? 

CB: That you don't have to be a super brainiac or super smart or a super nerd to be an engineer. I like to say that anything worth having is worth working for. So if it's important and it's something you want to do, even if it doesn't come to you easy, let's figure out how to get you the resources you need in order to be successful. 

NW: Let’s turn now to your childhood and find out the touch points in your life that led you to where you are today and that inspired you to follow the path into engineering and robotics. 

CB: Absolutely. It was very nontraditional. Sometimes when I talk to my coworkers who are also engineers about their beginnings, it's extremely different from mine. A lot of them had moms or dads who were in STEM. They may have worked in garages with their parents, worked on cars, put TVs together, or took TVs apart. But I like to say someday I'm going to write my autobiography and it's going to be called From Barbies to Bots, My Unexpected Journey to STEM. Because I did not start off with any of that. 

My mom was a kindergarten teacher for 30 years. Her mom was a piano teacher for 30 years. There's no one in my life who was an engineer or a scientist. My beginning was my Barbies. The foundations for engineering are really just having a creative spirit and being able to put things together, think, take things apart, figure out how they work. So for me, that was my doll. A lot of my innovation came in the ways of, “I need to make clothes for my Barbie. I need to make a house for my Barbie.”

STEM probably came later, maybe around fifth or sixth grade. I always loved math and science. I had a principal tell my mom, “I feel like she's wasting her abilities here and you should really look at putting her in a magnet school.’ I'm from Nashville, Tennessee. At the time, they had started a public magnet school. There was no fee; you just had to pay to go there. And so my mom took me out of my junior high and put me in a magnet school.

It was there that probably started my STEM journey, because I got recruited to be in a program called Inroads. And Inroads is a program to get kids from under-resourced communities prepared to do internships in business, science, engineering, et cetera. I had a career counselor tell me I really should consider engineering. Up until that point, I was going to be a high school math teacher, because I was going to be a teacher like my mom. I was like, I don't know what an engineer is and I don't even know if I would like to be an engineer 

There were no cell phones; the internet was not a big thing So I walked to the library after school and just looked up, what is an engineer? I read about it—it wasn't the train conductor that I thought it was. I was like, looks okay. I'm just not sure. So that's why I actually have two bachelor's degrees, one from Spelman College and one from Georgia Tech, because I wanted to get my math and my electrical engineering degree. Just in case the engineering thing didn't work out, I still had my math degree to fall back on to become a high school math teacher.

NW: It's really funny because when I was trying to hone down what I wanted to do, I also went to the library and looked up engineering in the encyclopedia. But when you first encountered engineering, what was that like and what made you start to fall in love with it?

CB: Interestingly enough, when I got to Georgia Tech—and unfortunately it's still this way even today—there are not a lot of women in engineering, there are not a lot of Black people in engineering. The majority of my professors were white men. And although I found the topic interesting, I did not find the way that it was being taught interesting or the dynamics of how I interacted with my professors or my classmates that interesting. 

So I was falling in love with a topic, but at the same time, it was becoming a love-hate relationship with the way that engineering is marketed, sold, who people think can be engineers, how that's projected, and how those stereotypes sometimes translate into your experiences. Even to this day, I still have some of my students who will tell me they experienced the same thing. 

My area is controls and robotics. The classes that I liked the most were the classes that had a lot of math in them and where I could see how I could design something to do something and see it achieve that, such as making a robot follow a wall or track a ball. So it was a little bit of those two dynamics. And even in the midst of all of that, even though I was sometimes struggling and not doing that well, in my mind, I'm going, I could teach this stuff better than they do. I could make this look way more interesting than they do. 

That was the beginning of my journey. And I love engineering, but I don't love the way they're showing me engineering. So it became a marrying of those two things together to create my current career, which is an engineering professor. Because I do want my students to say, hey, you don't act like my other professors. Well, good, I don't mean to. 

NW: That makes a lot of sense. So you did your undergraduate, and then you went straight to do your master's and then to PhD, or did you do any work in between?

CB: No. So one of the things that happened at Georgia Tech is not only did I struggle a bit, but also, my grades were not the best. I had to work multiple jobs. And in the time of doing that, my schoolwork started to suffer. So although while at Georgia Tech, I really wanted to get my PhD and become an engineering professor, I knew that my grades were not gonna get me anywhere near where I needed to be for graduate school. 

After I graduated, I moved to Michigan from Atlanta to work for Ford Motor Company and then Detroit Edison, which is an electric utility company, as a controls engineer. I did that for about two years, not only because I needed to get the experience, but also because I needed to pay off my student loans, which were out of control. While I was at Ford, I was in something called the National Society of Black Engineers, Detroit Alumni Extension. There was a professor at Wayne State who had gotten a grant to support a student to get their master's degree, but it had to be a student of color. And it was in controls, which was the area that I was most excited about. And I got it. 

About a year in, I was working full time and going to school full time. And I was falling asleep in class. I was exhausted because I worked in a windshield plant where I had to program the robots and make sure the robots were running. When the line is down, that's money. They could call you in the middle of the night and be like, we need you to come to work and get the robot up.

I had to take a leave from my job because I was like, I'm never going to get my master's degree like this. I'm exhausted. I took a leave, I got my master's, and then before I returned to Ford, Detroit Edison approached me about another job opportunity. I knew I wanted my PhD, but I was like, huh, okay, fine. 

About a year into that job, I was like, enough. If I keep putting it off, I'm not going to go. I'm having the same conversation with one of my students right now. He's debating whether he should go straight to his PhD or go work. I told him, you do what's best for you, but remember, once you get into the good life of making money and not having to live like a broke student and study all the time, it's really hard to transition back. 

So that's why a year into my job at Detroit Edison, I quit and went to Vanderbilt, because I knew if I put it off much longer, I wasn't gonna do it because going back to living like a broke college student is not ideal. But those are the sacrifices you make to do something that you know is important. And it was more important for me to be an engineering professor, something you don't see a lot of.

NW: You mentioned that when you were in college, that the way that engineering was presented to you wasn't very attractive. Could you give us an idea of what it is like to be in a class that's taught by you?

CB: I'm going to start out by telling you what it was like and what I didn't like, and then I'll tell you the difference. Some of the challenges are the type of school. I went to Georgia Tech—they call it an engineer factory. There are tiers of universities, like research one, research two, and those values are set by how many PhDs you graduate, how many grant dollars the school brings in, how many research dollars, how many undergraduates, and things like that. For professors who are at an R1 or R2 school, their school's mission is to produce graduates, to produce PhDs, produce masters, publish papers in tier one journals.

The challenge with that is that people will focus on how they're assessed. Promotion and tenure is based upon research, teaching, and service. At schools like that, what they care most about is research, number of PhDs, how much money you're bringing in, and how many papers you're publishing.

Because of that, the last thing on those professors' minds is their undergraduate students. In those classes, I couldn't go to a professor's office for office hours. First of all, you could never find them. If you did find them, they were like, I don't really have time for you. I need you to go talk to the teaching assistant or one of my grad students. And even if I was to talk to them, they were not warm, friendly, approachable, kind, or supportive. That's what I did not like. But I also did not realize it's because they're trying to please two masters, and the master of promotion, tenure, retention, and grant dollars was way more than what this little lowly brown girl in the undergraduate class cared about.

I teach at a different type of school, because I did not want to ever have to make a choice between helping a student and focusing on my lab. So even though I have a lab now, my undergraduate students work in my lab. In my class, I know all of my students' names. This is another big one. I talk to my students, not just about the class content, but, oh, look, you got a haircut, looks good. What'd you do this weekend? Being able to let them see the human side of engineering. I had professors when I was an undergrad who literally looked at their feet when they talked to you. 

Caring more about the person than about the thing is a big part of my journey. If you come to me and tell me, I really hate this, I don't think I wanna be an engineer anymore—okay, let's talk about what you want to do. Everyone I produce will not be an engineer. But I haven't done my job if I have not helped develop the person they're meant to be. And that's what I did not get as an undergraduate. I got, if you can't do this and you can't cut it, then maybe you need to just go home. 

One of my favorite stories is about this young man. He was a Black man. He came to me and he said, “I'm failing your class. What can we do? How can we get me over the line?” I said, “Baby, you're not getting over that line. You're taking this class over. There's no hope for you.” He's a working engineer now. And he came back to me and he said, “I was so mad at you. I was so mad at you when you failed me in that class, but I took it over. I graduated, I'm doing great, and you were one of my favorite professors.”

Me telling you that you have to take a class over does not mean I don't love you. I will support you all the way through, but sometimes taking that class over will build character. I failed classes in undergrad too. You learn from that experience, good or bad. And that's the kind of professor that I want to be. I want to be authentically myself each and every day so that they can see that there's a lot of different ways to be an engineer. And some of them are people-centered and person-centered. It's about me helping you, because that's really what engineers are here to do, improve society and help people. If you're just looking at the code, the math, and the science and you're taking the people aspect out, you're doing something wrong.

NW: Agreed, agreed. And I think it's wonderful how much support you give to your undergrads.

Switching tracks a little bit, I hear that you are writing a book. What inspired you to start writing fiction?

CB: During the pandemic, I was talking to some of my colleagues. They're all Black women in engineering as well. And we always have talked about how one of the reasons why we don't have enough diversity is that engineering has a marketing problem. It was me and Dr. Monica Cox, Dr. Tahira Reid Smith, and Dr. Tequila Harris, who were all at different universities. We said that we're all going to write books about Black women in engineering who are professors. 

We're still working on getting that series, called the Catalyst Chronicles, out. But in the midst of doing that, we met some people who are fiction writers and have become mentors and coaches. Through that, we started writing smaller books to get started. 

The first book I released was me doing that. I've called them Black Stem Romances. (Editor’s Note: Read more about Dr. Berry’s books here!) I just finished the second of those, hopefully to come out later this summer. 

But really, the whole goal was for us to find a different way of marketing engineering to diverse populations. I was so excited to find that some people actually had taken my first book and were sharing it with their high school students, because the research shows that we start to lose young women who may have been interested in math and science, young Black women included, somewhere around fifth or sixth grade. 

If we can start writing some novels, cartoons, comic books, whatever, so they see themselves, we can retain them all the way through. We just have to find ways for people to continue to see mentors, role models, and themselves in this field.

NW: Oh, that's excellent. That is definitely a great way to market engineering because you'll capture people's imaginations.

So can you tell our audience a little bit more about where they can find you?

CB: Yes, the name of my company is NoireSTEMinist. Where that came from is when I started doing my robotics for the streets and my STEM for the streets work, I was trying to find a way to describe the fact that I'm a woman who's promoting STEM to increase diversity and in particular, focusing on getting more Black and Brown people into STEM. And so NoireSTEMinist just was a natural conglomerate of all of that together. 

But the thing I'm most excited about is I have also just recently launched my open source robot kit. I've had people asking me for a while for a robot kit. So I now have one that you can 3D print. As long as you can get access to a 3D printer and you can buy some things online, you can print and build your own robot. Or if you absolutely cannot do that, you can also buy an assembled robot on my website. That's one of the things I'm really excited about. 

And as you've already mentioned, my second Black STEM romance is hopefully going to come out at the end of July. But the first one came out July of last year. So the first book was Elevated Inferno: Monet's Moment. (Editor’s Note: There’s an audiobook version too!) And it was about a young lady who's getting a graduate degree in computer science and robotics where she wants to design interactive robots to engage with autistic children in order to help them with their socialization skills as well as learning some things. She's on her way to her dream job interview at a robotics company when the elevator breaks down.

NW: Oh no.

CB: There is a character in that book, his name is Moses, and he is Reese's best friend, and he is a Lothario. Although he's encouraging Reese and Monet to get together, he's kind of like not a one woman man. Book two is actually about him. There is someone who is able to get him to hang up his, his whatever and become a one woman man. The book coming out in July is called Breaking Point: Chandler’s Choice. Every book is going to have a Black woman in STEM, somehow related. Chandler is the female character in book two, and she's a nurse. Moses is gonna meet her as she's exercising, walking in the park, trying to spit game. That's going to be the beginning of their love journey. And actually, the next two books are also going to be related. They're all going to have the same universe of characters.

NW: Oh, that's great. Thank you so much for sharing your love and your passion for engineering, for robotics, as well as for people, especially students. And thank you for making the environment of engineering more inclusive.

CB: Absolutely. Thank you. Have a good day.

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