SBSE was founded in 1973 by Professor Clayton Bates and a small group of Stanford graduate students, two years before the National Society of Black Engineers was born at Purdue. Bates had arrived a year earlier as the first Black faculty member on the tenure track in the School of Engineering, and later became its first Black tenured professor. He saw that Black scientists and engineers at Stanford needed a community built to help them get in, stay in, and graduate. SBSE was that community before there was a national movement to join. When NSBE took shape, SBSE went on to join it as Stanford’s chapter.
That mission has carried the chapter for more than fifty years. In the early 2000s, SBSE hosted NSBE’s Spring Regional Conference on campus and won National Distinguished Chapter of the Year two years in a row. Members tutored local students through NSBE Jr. and the East Palo Alto Boys and Girls Club, logging hundreds of service hours each year. Today we carry that same work forward: building a home for Black students in science and engineering, and making sure the next generation finds one waiting for them.