BLACKSBURG, Va. (WDBJ) - There aren’t many African Americans working in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) field, leaving the industry with a significant racial gap. One Virginia Tech professor is spending a lot of time working hard to change that.

As a scientist and engineer with an expertise in ‘space science’, Wayne Scales is no stranger to the STEM world. Scales teaches engineering courses at Virginia Tech. When he’s not in the classroom, he’s working to bring diversity to the STEM field. African Americans are being underrepresented in this work, making up only about 9%.

“It’s not a very pretty picture. I look in my field as a space scientist as probably one hundredth of a percent or less African Americans in the field, literally no more than two or three in the whole country,” Scales said.

Scales remembers growing up in the ‘60s, on a tobacco farm in Martinsville. The odds for a Black boy to grow up and be successful were slim there during that time.

“I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember that day when I went to school. I know my parents were devastated on that day, but there were other ones of my classmates. They did not understand the significance of it, and they were actually making fun of the fact that he had been assassinated,” Scales said.

Scales also recounted Black people not being allowed to eat at the only restaurant in town, but this didn’t stop his dream of being successful.

His interest in STEM sparked with him as a young child, lying on the living room floor one day, watching television.

“Man landed on the moon in 1969. So I was a small boy lying on the floor in our house watching a small black-and-white television. The famous newscaster, Walter Cronkite, was announcing how close the spacecraft was getting to the surface of the moon, and then finally, when they landed on the moon, it was like elation. A bell went off. This is so cool. This is what I have to do,” Scales said.

Fast forward to today, Scales is now ringing the bell for other people who look like him. From collaborating with other HBCUs for more resources to be available for students interested in STEM, to helping bring the first space weather radar facility to Africa, for those communities to have the same opportunities.

“There is no one group that can do this better than the other, so we need to embrace and bring in all the possible talent that can help,” Scales said.