For Carr, there was some exposure along the way that brought him to the field of engineering, something his dad didn’t have, and it’s that kind of discovery he wants to ensure all kids of color and women have.
“He had no clue that these careers were out there for him and the same for me,” Carr said of his father. “I didn’t know it because I didn’t know a lot of engineers.”
Carr, 46, said black engineers weren’t prevalent in his community.
“You kind of grow up to be what you know and what you see,” he said.
‘Stumbled upon engineering’
Studying biology at Howard University in Washington in the late 1990s, Carr — who initially planned to go to medical school — realized over his four years that his passion wasn’t in fixing people, but in making things to help people.
“I would say I stumbled upon engineering,” he said.
Right out of college with a biology degree, Carr began working at Gene Logic Inc., a biotech company in Gaithersburg, that eventually paid for him to get a master’s in engineering from Johns Hopkins, bringing him one step closer to his goal.
He was surprised at the diversity of the staff at Gene Logic and had a similar reaction when he came to APL in 2003.
“I would say it was more diverse than I expected, but in leadership there wasn’t a lot of diversity,” Carr said of the Applied Physics Lab, a not-for-profit research center that provides research and engineering services to the government.
During his coming up in the STEM world, Carr described the state of diversity as somewhere between not being the only one and hoping for a more diverse staff.
“In order for us to come up with the best solutions, we need diversity of thought,” he said. “We need people to bring their whole selves to APL; that means your whole self in terms of your culture, your gender identity, your ethnicity, your race, so that you can bring your experience, your knowledge, to help us solve these really hard problems.”
Today, Carr runs a team of five people who oversee programs across the state to bring more kids from underrepresented backgrounds into STEM through all sorts of avenues.
He said he’s striving to create a world in which no kid can say they’ve never met an engineer.
“I spend a lot of time exploring ideas that people here at [APL] have of how to reach kids,” Carr said. “I spend a lot of time in the community in an advisory capacity.”
Carr’s team works with local school districts and at the state level to explain what the workforce needs are.
“Ultimately the school system is producing folks that we’re going to need for our future workforce,” he said.
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