Stanford Ph.D. student, Favour Nerrise, is on a mission to graduate 10,000 Black engineers annually by 2025, but this is a job she cannot do alone.

According to dev color in motion, a non-profit that helps companies find Black tech talent, only 5% of developers, engineers, and programmers are Black and currently about 6,000 Black engineers are graduating annually.

Being the only Black woman in her 160-person electrical engineering Ph.D. group, Nerisse knew that she needed to do something to get more Black people involved in the field starting from younger ages.

Nerisse earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of Maryland in 2021 and is currently a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Stanford University, researching tools that can help medical professionals better understand how the brain functions.

Growing up, Nerrise wanted to be a brain surgeon, but quickly found herself being more fascinated with the tools that are used to perform surgeries. Around the age of 10, with the help of her mother, she found two organizations that involved STEM, as well as the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE).

NSBE supports and promotes the aspirations of students, both collegiate and pre-collegiate, in engineering and technology. Nerisse, a long-time member of the organization, has presented a plan to up these numbers so that by 2025 10,000 Black engineers will graduate annually.

A key piece of the plan is their target audiences.

NSBE has always offered leadership training to college students but has now implemented outreach programs to younger students starting from third grade.

“We might even need to go all the way down to like, kindergarten because we found that if the kids weren’t exposed early, Black and brown students typically were at a disadvantage of catching up in mathematics and science,” Nerisse said in a CNBC article.

Along with mentoring and hosting their annual convention, NSBE has also partnered with INROADS to publish a DEI corporate index based on experiences from members of NSBE who have interned or worked at major companies.

Both Nerisse and various members of NSBE are working hard to up these numbers by 2025.