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Insight News • February 5, 2024 - February 11, 2024 • Page 1

INSIGHT NEWS IS AUDITED BY THE ALLIANCE FOR AUDITED MEDIA TO PROVIDE OUR ADVER TISER PAR TNERS WITH THE HIGHES T LEVEL OF MEDIA ASSURANCE.

Insight News

February 5, 2024 - February 11, 2024

Vol. 51 No. 6• The Journal For Community News, Business & The Arts • insightnews.com

Inventor Dr. Timothy Childs, Educator Eric Mahmoud

A culture of problem-solving

STEM SATURDAY AT HARVEST BEST ACADEMY Dr. Timothy Childs and his wife Lorraine Childs with Barack Obama.

Eric Mahmoud

Senate President Bobby Joe Champion is partnering with Insight News and other community institutions to promote this year’s Black History Month STEM Saturday event 11 am to 1:30 pm February 10th, at Harvest Best Academy, 1300 Olson Memorial Highway, in North Minneapolis. Alexis Varner, Legislative Aide to Senator Champion, who penned an excellent backgrounder article on the origin and power of the Black History Month observance for this edition of Insight News (page 3) discussed the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) Saturday event last week on The Conversation with Al McFarlane on KFAI FM 90.3, a program that was streamed globally across McFarlane Media You Tube, Facebook, Twitter and Linked In social media platforms. Varner said students will get the chance to model physical anatomy using edible ingredients, investigate particles that make up the bloodstream, and learn to check pulses and identify main arteries involved. “This ties into what we’re doing with the Black inventors as well,” she said, “because some main contributions that aren’t really heard about from Black inventors include the blood plasma bag, which was invented by Charles Drew, or the traffic light invented by Garrett Morgan, and the elevator invented by Alexander Miles. This ties together everything that we’re doing with to promote the intersection of health science and the inventive genius of our people.” Hosting STEM Saturday is Eric Mahmoud, an educational expert and author with over 30 years of what many see as unparalleled experience in shaping the educational landscape. He is the CEO of Harvest Best Academy. He’s dedicated a career to providing innovative and effective education, particularly focusing on empowering Black children. He has a remarkable track record. 80% of the graduates of Harvest Best Academy transitioned to college, establishing Harvest Best Academy as one of the top schools in North Minneapolis for the past 13 years. Under its leadership, Harvest Best Academy has achieved a number of milestones. They created the first and only mobile innovation lab. They call it The BEAST. They created it during the COVID-19 pandemic to offer continued STEM education to scholars. In the KFAI interview, Mahmoud said ,“I really appreciate Senator Champion partnering with us on this project. Here’s a little bit of history of the STEM Saturday initiative. It actually started in the office of Louis King, who led Summit Academy OIC (Opportunity Industrialization Center). Probably about five years ago, I walked into his office; he had all these toys, what would be considered toys, on his desk, and he said, ‘I want to build a whole program around this.” He had robotics. He had all of these different fun educational STEM initiatives. And the idea was to spark interest in STEM. Actually, I have an engineering background, and that engineering background is based on the fact that when I was 13 years old, I was introduced to electronics. And that really got my interest in this whole idea of science, technology, engineering, and math. “We want to

create the exact same type of opportunity for our community, our students in our community. We want to spark their interests. We want to give them options. So on Saturday, as Sister Alexis laid out, we’re not only going to have STEM projects, we’re going to lift up Black inventors, current Black inventors, and past Black inventors. And the reason why that’s so important, if you don’t think that you’ve done anything, you can’t believe that you can do anything. So we want to show that we have a long history of inventions and producing things in this country. And so STEM is a continuation of a legacy for African and AfricanAmerican people. Dr. Timothy Childs earned his PhD in physics in 1989 from Stanford University. That’s where he was also a Bell Laboratory fellow. And from ‘89 to ‘91, he was a research scientist at Honeywell Incorporated, where he received numerous honors and awards, including first place in an international competition for next-generation semiconductor circuit technology. In ‘91, he formed his first private company TMPI, after negotiating key transfers of his patented millimeter wavelength, called “MMW “technology, from Honeywell. Thereafter, he was selected by the Pentagon’s Air Force Special Programs Office to collaborate with Lockheed Martin to implement leadingedge MMW applications. As a part of the Pentagon program, Lockheed Martin transferred equipment and MMW technology to TMPI. During the period up to 2012, TMPI executed many MMW-focused contracts for the US government, including Department of Defense, Special Services, NASA, National Science Foundation, and more. In 2012, Dr. Childs founded his second private company called, TLC Millimeter Wave Products Inc., which became his current firm, Guardian’s licensor to commercially exploit his vast body of knowledge regarding MMW technologies and their applications to multiple industries. So, over a period of 30 years, Dr. Childs has been awarded multiple patents and received accolades from President George H. Bush, President Bill Clinton, and President Barack Obama for his innovative technology contributions to the US government and his extraordinary breakthroughs in threat detection and incoming missile defense applications. In ‘99, Dr. Childs and his wife Lorraine created the TLC Education Foundation for their work with underprivileged youth, assisting them to realize their educational potential. Dr. Childs and Lorraine have dedicated significant time and resources to the community organizations involved in education, youth development, and social justice. Childs said, “The Pentagon took notice of us, and we began to work with Lockheed Martin and a few others. We developed breakthrough technology for our government to help with security of this country and of our allies. And in doing so, we developed technologies and patents that continue to grow. For our military and NASA, we developed special chips.” “Guardian School Security Systems came about when I got a call around 2014 from my daughter, who was attending Seattle Pacific University. And she was crying on the phone … crying and couldn’t stop. You could hardly understand it. And she had just left the student union where she

STEM SATURDAY

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