![Jerrod Henderson [center], an assistant professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is the Cullen College of Engineering's latest recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. [Left to right] Jamiel Williams, Amanual Getaneh, Henderson, Ahmad McCray and Omar Sanchez.](/sites/ccoe.egr.uh.edu/files/images/news/2023/group-crop-01.jpg "Jerrod Henderson [center], an assistant professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is the Cullen College of Engineering's latest recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. [Left to right] Jamiel Williams, Amanual Getaneh, Henderson, Ahmad McCray and Omar Sanchez.")
Jerrod Henderson, an assistant professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is the Cullen College of Engineering's latest recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award.
Henderson's proposal, “Centering the Engineering Identity of Black Men to Enhance Representation and Degree Completion,” seeks to strengthen the future U.S. engineering workforce by enabling and encouraging the participation of all citizens in the engineering enterprise, particularly Black men. According to the American Society for Engineering Education's Engineering & Engineering Technology by the Numbers 2020 Report, Black men represented only 2.8 percnt of those who earned engineering bachelor's degrees.
“I'm happy to share that I've been awarded the NSF CAREER Award,” Henderson said. “Thank you to all Henderson Research Group members past and present, my collaborators and my mentors for all of your support. I'm especially grateful to my undergraduate research student Jared Davis and postdoc Le Shorn Benjamin, who helped collect and analyze the preliminary data for this project.”
The research is funded for $563,407 through 2028. Henderson has been pioneering the start of an engineering education program at Cullen via multiple partnerships – an ASEE-supported fellowship with Benjamin, and a multi-college study with Daniel Burleson, an instructional associate professor at the Cullen College of Engineering's First Year Experience, and Virginia Rangel, assistant professor of Educational Leadership & Policy Studies at the College of Education.
Henderson joined UH in 2016 as an instructional associate professor, and became the director of PROMES in 2017, a position he held until 2022. Henderson is also the co-founder of the St. Elmo Brady Academy. He was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor in 2021.