Energy Education for Every Classroom

Why Latimer Energy Academy Exists

Dr. Naeem Turner-Bandele created Latimer Energy Academy on a simple but powerful conviction: the gap between what students need and what many STEM programs deliver is real, and it is fixable. That conviction didn't emerge from theory—it emerged from more than a decade of teaching and mentoring STEM students across multiple contexts.

He worked in university-level engineering programs, in community STEM initiatives like the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) and Carnegie Mellon’s Summer Academy for Math & Science (SAMS), and in classrooms where he taught alongside teachers. He saw the national numbers—only about 3 in 10 eighth-graders are proficient in science and math. He also saw what students were actually being asked to do in programs claiming to address that gap. Many were well-intentioned. Many were aligned to standards. But too many still left students without genuine technical work, without real tools and data used together, and without the integration across disciplines that the future actually demands.

What he knew from the other side of those numbers mattered. His background as an educator and researcher in power systems and energy infrastructure, combined with his experience as the founder of Latimer Enterprises (an energy technology company) and co-founder of The League of Extraordinary Parents, gave him a rare vantage point. But equally important: he didn't grow up with STEM mentors positioning engineering as an option. He didn't attend special bridge programs or clubs. He found his way to electrical engineering despite that gap—which is exactly why he could see so clearly what was missing when he looked at K-12 classrooms. His degrees—a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University, a Ph.D. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and an MBA from NYU Stern—meant he could read both the data and the lived experience. And that combination let him see the structural problem beneath the surface.

K-12 instruction too often keeps science, engineering, math, computer science, and data reasoning separated into older subject silos, while the systems and careers students will actually encounter require them working together. That misalignment stays easy to miss until much later, when students have already drifted into fewer options—when the gap has hardened into lost time.

Latimer Energy Academy is what that diagnosis became. Every project puts students to work with real tools, real data, and real systems where science, math, engineering, and programming work together as they actually do in the world. Teachers, parents, and community leaders teach projects without needing a technical background themselves; LEA provides the structure, the materials, and the evidence. The goal is not exposure for its own sake. The goal is real skill, clearer evidence of understanding, and stronger preparation for the world students are growing into.

That conviction about youth learning runs deep. Dr. Naeem is the author of What Are We Gonna Do Today? (2015) and co-author of The Amazing World of STEM (2020 and 2023), children's books that show how long he has been thinking about how young learners come to understand technical systems in concrete, tactile ways. For years—before LEA, before the platform, before the widespread attention to learning gaps—he has been asking the same question: how do we help all young people see themselves as capable of understanding and building the systems around them? LEA is his answer.