Review Magazine Volume 4 by PVAMU Research&Innovation

VOL4 RESEARCH

EXCELLENCE

OBSERVING A BREAKTHROUGH AT PVAMU

NO1

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2020

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IN THIS

ISSUE 42 SPOTLIGHT

STUDENT

International grad student adapts to culture, rapidly advances toward promising career opportunities Honduran native adjusts to new nation while launching a promising career in science

3 A RESEARCH DESTINATION

Research & Innovation Has Prairie View Poised for Research Growth by Harnessing the Energy, Resources of Greater Houston Region

10 ENERGY TRIAD

Biomass Energy, Environmental Sustainability and Offshore Wind Energy

VIEW THROUGH TWO A CULTURAL LENSES

PVAMU Professor Breaking New Ground on Criminology Research in Arab Nations

18 SECURE IN THE MISSION

PVAMU’s Integrated Food Security Research Center Supports the University’s Goal of Solving Complex Issues Facing Underserved, Under-resourced Communities in State, Region

22 INNOVATING THE FUTURE

Paving the Path Forward for Innovation, Commercialization, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (ICEED)

26 NEW VASCULAR IMPLANT DEVICE

COULD ELIMINATE NEEDLE STICK CHALLENGES OF DIALYSIS Researcher’s Collaboration is Example of ICEED’s Model for Success

28 I NNOVATION AT PVAMU

A Multifunctional Sensor for Detection of Electromagnetic Ionization and Radiation Environments

OBSERVING A BREAKTHROUGH AT PVAMU

From Space Exploration to Farming, $8 Million Observatory to Play a Pivotal Role

30 M ULTI-DISCIPLINARY ENGINEERING

Team Awarded $3 Million Federal Grant to Construct New Center for Research on High Pressure Combustion

34 BUILDING HOPE

School of Architecture’s Community Development Graduate Program Helps Preserve Legacy of Proud Historical Communities That Are Forgotten, Overlooked

40 STEM SELL

New $1 Million Scholarship Program Aims to Attract Brightest STEM Scholars to PVAMU Through Additional Financial Assistance

DESTINATION Research & Innovation has Prairie View Poised for Research Growth by Harnessing the Energy and Resources of Greater Houston Region

There’s an axiom in real estate that “location is everything.” In assessing the unlimited opportunities for Prairie View to expand research through the Office of Research & Innovation (R&I), location matters, too. “The energy of the students and faculty, the vibrant learning community and the opportunities Prairie View has for research growth is tremendous,” says Dr. Magesh Rajan, Ph.D., P.E., M.B.A., the new vice president of R&I. “Being close to the economic hub of Houston, close to NASA, and our proximity to the Port of Houston, the chemical industries and the Energy Corridor all attracted me to come to Prairie View to further grow and elevate PVAMU’s Research & Innovation enterprise.”

Dr. Magesh Rajan, Ph.D., P.E., M.B.A. Vice President Research & Innovation

“We love being Panthers. We love purple and gold,” Rajan says. “I wanted to come back home to Texas and there’s no better place to come back to than the Texas A&M University System.”

“Here, we love being Panthers. We love purple and gold,” Rajan says. “I wanted to come back home to Texas and there’s no better place to come back to than the Texas A&M University System.” Rajan is in his first year at the helm of Research & Innovation (R&I), Prairie View’s portal to discovering new knowledge, advancing scholarship and propelling economic development throughout the region and Texas. R&I fosters and promotes research and scholarly activity at PVAMU by ensuring that faculty, staff and students receive the support necessary to undertake a range of research activities. Rajan is no stranger to the Texas A&M University System. He worked for nearly a decade in the System in research leadership roles at places such as Texas A&M University Corpus Christi. He moved into academic leadership as department head and dean in South Dakota in the School of Mines and Technology before moving back to Texas. He is a trained electrical engineer and has conducted scholarly funded research in the areas of plasma science, biomedical applications and biomedical technologies. His experience launching three successful companies as an entrepreneur will serve him well in helping to develop the spirit of entrepreneurship under the R&I umbrella. With family and longtime friends in Texas, returning to Prairie View has been a homecoming.

In the last year, Rajan has been on a fact-gathering mission, listening and learning about various research activities across the university, working to bring an enhanced structure to the research operations within R&I and leverage research best practices. The vision of R&I in collaboration with the overall PVAMU research enterprise is to significantly grow externally funded research and innovation that results in a vibrant research community for faculty, research scientists and students. “We’re looking forward to developing initiatives aimed at faculty research advancement through grant writing support, graduate student support, travel support, and support for intellectual property and commercialization,” he says. “We’re also looking forward to working with the campus research community and providing leadership, advocacy and visibility support to grow to the research enterprise at PVAMU.” Beyond those aims, the goals of R&I are focused on: • D octoral granting institution status – enabling PVAMU to achieve Carnegie Mellon research status. • O ffice of Research Advancement – focused strategically on growing externally funded research across various programs at PVAMU. The office includes research development officers, who serve as resources for active research faculty and scientists. • C hancellor’s Research Initiatives – Prairie View has six chancellor research initiatives, and R&I’s goal is to enhance and support each one to its fullest potential, as well as potentially add new CRIs.

• V isibility – R&I has been an advocate for higher visibility into the vibrant research activities across the university. For example, R&I has advocated for at least one research article to be featured on the Prairie View home page at all times, as well as additional awareness of exceptional researchers and research activities on campus through social media. • U ndergraduate research – R&I has enhanced the Office of Undergraduate Research to support students from a wide range of disciplines to gain hands-on research skills, as well as mentor and encourage them to pursue graduate research work. • I nnovation – R&I has created a new Innovation, Commercialization, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development Office to promote and grow the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. R&I also has offices under its umbrella that support a wide range of research-extensive activities across the university, including: • T itle III – R&I is proud that the University’s Title III Programs fall under the R&I umbrella. These programs impact academic and administrative areas and functions across the university. • O ffice of Research Compliance – R&I’s vision is to bring a sense of support culture from the office, as well as facilitate the Prairie View research community in an effective and efficient way by providing awareness and training to the campus community. • S ponsored Programs – These programs have been functioning effectively for several years, and R&I looks forward to seeing enhancements in the areas of faculty proposals and submissions, and training for faculty’s grant management.

R&I collaborates with external entities beyond Prairie View on research initiatives that impact and enrich the lives of Texans and beyond. Those entities include: • S tate and Federal Legislatures – R&I is highly motivated to work with regional and state representatives, as well as The Texas A&M University System representatives to enhance and improve visibility for PVAMU research in federal agencies in Washington, D.C., and Austin, and to advocate for important research programs. • E conomic Development Organizations – The Innovation, Commercialization, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development (I-CEED) partners with economic development organizations in the region, including Prairie View, Waller County, Hempstead and Greater Houston in support of research and commercialization activities. • I ndustry – R&I works with industries in Texas and the region for contracts, intellectual property licensing and commercialization. Overall, R&I offers essential and strategic expertise to support all aspects of sponsored activities, including research compliance, proposal development, and pre-award services, interdisciplinary and new program development, and guidance on conceptualizing and protecting intellectual property through I-CEED. Beyond R&I’s excellent location as a research hub in the dynamic Greater Houston area, it has the support it needs from PVAMU administration to move to a new level. “My interactions with Prairie View have been nothing less than exceptional,” Rajan says. “President Simmons’ mission, leadership and vision for the University and the future of the research enterprise is encouraging and supportive, and her significant research experience will be of great support to lead the PVAMU research enterprise. I am thrilled and look forward to continued work with Dr. Simmons to advance the research community.” o

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DR . P R EM K U MA R S A G A N TI REGENTS PROFESSOR Department of Physics

FROM SPACE EXPLORATION TO FARMING, $8 MILLION OBSERVATORY TO PLAY PIVOTAL ROLE

OBSERVING A BREAKTHROUGH

at PVAMU

SOLAR RESEARCH AT PRAIRIE VIEW A&M UNIVERSITY HAS LITERALLY

TAKEN ON A WHOLE NEW LOOK WITH THE RECENT COMPLETION OF THE PRAIRIE VIEW SOLAR OBSERVATORY COMPLEX

With its previous solar observatory, PVAMU ranked 13th in solar research among universities worldwide. But the new, $8 million solar observatory complex, funded by the U.S. Department of Education and Title III, and designed and built by PVAMU and TAMUS CRI/ RaISE, offers many more options for researchers, students, guest scientists and visitors. PVAMU built its first solar observatory in 1997. “We wanted to expand beyond the sun and observe the nighttime sky, so we needed a different set of telescopes, observatory piers, and also more powerful cameras,” says Regents Professor Dr. Premkumar Saganti, who also serves as principal investigator for the new observatory and who is currently a Professor of Physics, Coordinator of the Physics Program, and Director of the Chancellor’s Research Initiative (CRI) – Radiation Institute of Science and Engineering (RaISE). “We received a grant from NASA in early 2012 to build observatory class cameras and then sought a Department of Education grant to buy telescopes and expand our observatory,” says Saganti. “We wanted to build something that

would meet the educational needs of students, research goals for faculty, and also attract the interest of the general public.” Solar research is essential to a broad variety of organizations and individuals — from NASA’s space exploration to farmers around the world who must determine when to plant and harvest various kinds of crops, he adds. “We can now actually study the sunspot activity through various filters that appear in groups increasingly and disappear slowly over an 11-year, solar cycle period.” Equipped with powerful cameras, the new observatory also enables nighttime observation of clusters of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and planetary bodies. Additionally, observatory visitors can watch live feeds on the facility’s ground floor while authorized personnel operate equipment on the second and third floors. The Prairie View Solar Observatory Complex has ground-level telescopes that people can access, and additional mobile telescopes which can be rolled out of the observatory building to allow visitors to see, touch and work with the equipment.

The new solar observatory building is about 50 x 150 feet, Saganti adds, and is comprised of an east dome and a west dome connected to each other and encapsulated in one big structure. Each dome has its own independent piers isolated from any other part of the building and each is equipped with powerful telescopes. “We have two separate structures, that can hold two telescopes and allow us to look into the same galaxy simultaneously in a three-dimensional perspective,” says Saganti. “That is definitely a feature unique to Prairie View and I don’t think there is any other campus with this kind of capability.” “With our telescopes, we will be the only campus observing the sun and its impact during the daytime,” says Saganti. “At night, with our two other telescopes we can simultaneously observe the moon and other celestial objects. These capabilities will be very useful to the scientific community, will bring prominence to PVAMU, and will attract students to our campus.” In October 2018, for example, PVAMU developed a payload that launched into Earth’s polar orbit aboard the Ten-Koh spacecraft built by the Kyushu Institute of Technology-Japan (KIT) for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). Also, in December 2014, PVAMU was able to launch its first payload to deep-space around the sun through JAXA for Shinen2 of KIT-Japan.

“WE BELIEVE THAT WITHIN THE NEXT 10 YEARS, THERE WILL BE MORE PROMINENT ACHIEVEMENTS FROM THE PRAIRIE VIEW COMMUNITY,” SAGANTI ADDS. “THE OBSERVATORY IS A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY AND A LIFETIME INVESTMENT. WE’RE THANKFUL NOT ONLY FOR ALL THE EXTERNAL SUPPORT WE’VE HAD, BUT ALSO CERTAINLY THE SUPPORT OF OUR OWN ADMINISTRATION WHO HELPED US MOVE FORWARD EFFICIENTLY.” With about 1,500 students enrolled each semester in the physics courses, Saganti says the department hopes to soon start a new degree program for the study of astronomy. o

“We designed and developed the payload, SHARP-CPD (Solar and Heliospheric Assessment of Radiation Particles – Charged Particle Detector), from May 2017 through May 2018,” says Saganti, who served as principal scientist on the project. The payload project was a collaborative effort between the Texas A&M University System Chancellor’s Research Initiative (CRI), the Radiation Institute for Science and Engineering (RaISE), and the NASA Johnson Space Center for the Ten-Koh spacecraft of KIT-Japan. Researchers hope to have the spacecraft collect data over the next decade.

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ENERGY

TRIAD

BIOMASS ENERGY â&#x20AC;¢ ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY AND OFFSHORE WIND ENERGY With a major new grant secured from the National Science Foundation, the adrenalin of great expectations is coursing through the CREST Center for Energy and Environmental Sustainability (CEES) at Prairie View A&M University. Dr. Raghava R. Kommalapati, the PI and director, and his team earned the $5 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to pursue Phase II of a broad-based renewable energy and sustainability research effort, which also encompasses training a more diverse STEM workforce.

DR. RAGHAVA R. KOMMALAPATI Professor â&#x20AC;&#x201C; CREST Center for Energy and Environmental Sustainability (CEES)

PHASE 1 Phase I of the research effort began back in 2010. The CEES team produced more than 100 publications, 140 conference presentations and obtained more than $8 million in funds. With the new Phase II grant, research moves ahead in three key areas: bio-energy, environmental sustainability and offshore wind energy.

“SECURING A $5 MILLION GRANT FROM THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION (NSF) enables the kind of opportunities that would be unimaginable with the more common six-figure grants,” says Kommalapati. On projects funded by $200,000 to $500,000 grants, for example, the researcher may be able to recruit one or two students at best. However, with the $5 million NSF grant, it is conceivable that the CEES team will be able to hire 10 students per year for five years, he says.

“In addition to the research, we are expected to have a strong educational outreach component.” -Kommalapati “That’s a minimum of 50 students supported to engage in student research,” says Kommalapati. “In addition, we can reach out to another 50 to 100 students through scholarships, other projects and educational training.” The 11-member CEES research team includes experienced researchers from PVAMU’s civil engineering, chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, chemistry and agriculture departments.

For the bio-energy project, the CEES team will focus on producing hydrocarbon fuels that can be directly used to fuel motor vehicles. Biomass is organic material extracted from plants or from organic waste materials, and it is a renewable source of energy. “Most of what we’re doing now is producing ethanol and adding it to the gasoline as a supplement to fuel a vehicle,” Kommalapati says. “And the plant biomass we use to produce these hydrocarbon fuels is grown using fracking produced water treated using methods developed in our own research work.” Meanwhile, substantial goals are set for Phase II’s wind energy research. “In Phase II, we are expanding wind research to offshore,” adds Kommalapati. “The question is, how do you support this huge structure? You need to have offshore platforms and must make sure these are stable.” The wind energy team will study the reliability of these offshore platforms. For environmental sustainability, Kommalapati’s team is addressing the problems arising from a hydro-fracking process which is used to extract oil out of the earth. When oil is extracted, water is also extracted. This water carries a large amount of dissolved solids and various organic and inorganic content, making the water unsafe for any other use or safe disposal. This water is called produced water.

“When you have a big grant like this, it gives visibility to what you are doing.” -Kommalapati

“One of the methods that is used for the disposal of this produced water is called deep well injection. The problem with deep well injection however, is that it is known to increase seismic activity,” as recently reported in Oklahoma, notes Kommalapati. Even with the reported incidences of increased seismic activity, many U.S. states — including Texas — still use deep well injection. “That is a problem because we are extracting billions of gallons of water and don’t know what to do with this (unusable) water. Deep well injection is not a solution,” says Kommalapati. “We are running out of precious water resources and need to find alternate solutions to treat this water and reuse it.” The CEES team proposes treating the extracted water and using it for irrigation to produce biomass crops. “Those crops will then be used as raw material to produce hydrocarbon fuels,” Kommalapati adds. “In other words, we are taking water that has no use, producing crops with it and then using the crops to produce bio-energy.” The other environmental sustainability projects include life cycle analyses for all energy technologies and how climate change impacts future air quality. Life cycle analysis accounts for environmental impacts from all phases of energy generation. “For example, when constructing a wind turbine, you have to get the materials, allow for mining and transporting of wind blades for hundreds of miles,” he says. “All these factors have to be looked at when you’re trying to compare these different energies in an apples-to-apples comparison, and we call this, life cycle analysis.”

The NSF grant also enables the CEES team to invest in preparing new students for careers in energy research. “In addition to the research, we are expected to have a strong educational outreach component,” Kommalapati adds. “As part of that, we are working with the college to strengthen the energy minor that we already created under Phase I.” The CEES Phase II effort also involves creating a new energy engineering concentration within PVAMU’s current master of science in engineering program, and along with continued support for graduate students, Phase II funding will enable CEES to produce scholarships for undergraduate students to pursue an energy minor or do energy research, says Kommalapati. CEES also will host an energy conference at PVAMU in collaboration with three other centers supported by the NSF, including a center at California State University, Los Angeles, a center at California State University, Bakersfield, and one at North Carolina A&T University. Kommalapati says CEES also is planning a monthly seminar series on campus featuring guest speakers, possibly in conjunction with other PVAMU colleges. “When you have a big grant like this, it gives visibility to what you are doing,” Kommalapati says. “People know PVAMU has a center and you have national visibility.” o

VIEW

THROUGH TWO CULTURAL LENSES BREAKING N E W G R O U N D ON CRIMINOLOGY PVAMU PROFESSOR

RESEARCH IN ARAB NATIONS

DR. NABIL OUASSINI – PROFESSOR

JUSTICE STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF THE COLLEGE OF JUVENILE JUSTICE AND PSYCHOLOGY Dr. Nabil Ouassini’s cultural background is a valuable asset to his research in the Justice Studies Department of the College of Juvenile Justice and Psychology at Prairie View A&M University. Ouassini’s parents are natives of Morocco, and Ouassini, who speaks the Moroccan Arabic dialect, studied criminal justice legitimacy in Morocco as part of his dissertation in pursuit of his Ph.D. Ouassini is currently researching criminology in predominantly Arab nations, and his work is proving highly relevant in view of the ongoing U.S. involvement in much of the Middle East and North Africa. “There is now an argument for what’s being called, ‘Southern criminology,’ [a reference to nations located below or near the Equator] looking at the developing world, arguing that developing countries do not function the same way as the developed world and therefore, must have their own criminology,” says Ouassini. His research efforts are steadily earning attention and accolades. Recently, Ouassini received the highly competitive Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) Award. The CAORC Award enabled Ouassini to participate in an intensive, capacity-building and curriculum development program in India from December 2019 through January 2020. Ouassini studied how social, cultural, economic and environmental factors impact various aspects of Indian life. PVAMU will incorporate his research into aspects of the university’s criminal justice and juvenile justice curricula.

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Ouassini’s focus on Arab criminology stems from the U.S. having long served as the center of Western-oriented criminological research in all parts of the world. But once you acknowledge the U.S. criminal justice system’s own imperfections, Ouassini says there is obviously a need to study what other criminal justice systems — particularly those in predominantly Arab and Muslim nations — have adopted due to influences from the U.S. and other Western nations. “What I argue is that there should be a journal on Arab criminology,” he says, noting that most Arab and Muslim nations were once Western-dominated colonies and most have adopted various Western legal traditions. Having written his dissertation on Arab criminology prior to earning his Ph.D. in 2017, many of Ouassini’s essays are now being published as chapters in books or as articles in some of the world’s most prominent criminology publications. For example, Ouassini co-authored “Criminology in the Arab World: Misconceptions, Nuances and Future Prospects,” published in November 2019 in the British Journal of Criminology. Meanwhile, in the 2020 book, Media Ownership in Africa: Control, Challenges & Change, Ouassini contributed a chapter entitled, “Media Ownership and Development in Post-Qaddafi Libya.” When offering news on Arab criminology, Western news media all too often focus on one Arab constitutional monarchy — Saudi Arabia, a nation that has long had one of the most atrocious human rights records in the world. The problem with the ongoing Western focus on Saudi Arabia, Ouassini notes, is that although Saudi Arabia is a major regional power, its political system is far from representative of all Arab nations — many of which are highly secular, Ouassini says.

Much of the Western media recently gave favorable publicity to reforms implemented in Saudi Arabia and largely attributed them to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman — until Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist, was murdered at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, apparently by Saudi government agents. “There are mixed legal traditions, a mixture between the legal norms of the former colonial power and Islamic law,” he says. “Morocco, for example, practices a mixture of French civil law and Islamic law. The Moroccan criminal justice system is mainly French, while Moroccan family law is more Islamic.” Ouassini’s research also focuses on another fact often ignored in Western foreign policy circles whenever criticism is aimed at Arab criminal justice systems. “A lot of police departments and a lot of prisons around the world are following our example here in the United States,” Ouassini says. “Of course, there are some things we do well, and some things we don’t do well.” And then there’s the factor of the large number of Western criminologists who present themselves as “Arab experts,” but actually have little experience in Arab nations and often do not even speak or write Arabic. Many of these criminologists are clearly aligned with Western foreign policy agendas in the Arab world, Ouassini notes. “We know that some countries that do not take a pro-American stance might be criticized more than those that do take a pro-American stance,” he says. And ever since the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, the Western foreign policy establishment has had a notable Islamophobic element which generally complements the views of far-right Western political leaders who oppose Islamic immigration to the West.

OUASSINI’S RESEARCH ALSO FOCUSES ON ANOTHER FACT OFTEN IGNORED IN WESTERN FOREIGN POLICY CIRCLES WHENEVER CRITICISM IS AIMED AT ARAB CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS. “For a while, especially in the 2000s during the War on Terror, it was easy to get away with saying negative things about the Arab world,” Ouassini says. “One of the biggest mistakes we made in Iraq, is that the U.S. military is great at invading [and occupying] nations, but we don’t know what to do afterwards,” Ouassini notes. Specifically, when the U.S. occupational authority in Iraq disbanded the Iraqi army and the police force — more than 4 million people lost jobs, including men between the ages of 20 to 50. The Iraq War insurgency grew directly from these unemployed men. Ouassini points out that during Saddam Hussein’s presidency in Iraq, membership in Saddam’s Baathist Party was a prerequisite for anyone with career ambitions. Whether you liked it or not, you had to be a Baathist to serve in administrative positions in the military or the police. “Were these people really Baathists? No,” Ouassini says. “They needed a job, a paycheck and to be able to take care of their families.”

As his recent research in India indicates, Ouassini is on track to broaden his intensive research beyond the Arab world. One of his recently published articles dealt with war-time atrocities in Bangladesh. In a chapter of the 2019 book, Mass Violence and Genocide in Asia, Ouassini contributed the article, “Kill 3 Million and the Rest Will Eat of Our Hands: Genocide, Rape, and the Bangladeshi War of Liberation.” In the article, Ouassini notes how propaganda helped turn one segment of Bangladesh’s population against another. “From the outside looking in, we think they are all the same people,” Ouassini says. “But they have found differences among themselves.” Ouassini says he has learned how to tread carefully when researching in nations with authoritarian governments. “You have to know what that fine line is, and not cross it.” Ouassini’s research continues at a steady pace and he is currently co-editing a book on African criminology with an academic colleague based in Nairobi, Kenya. o

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SECURE SECURE IN THE

MISSION

PVAMU’S INTEGRATED FOOD SECURITY RESEARCH CENTER SUPPORTS THE UNIVERSITY’S GOAL OF SOLVING COMPLEX ISSUES FACING UNDERSERVED, UNDER-RESOURCED COMMUNITIES IN STATE, REGION

From the offices of Prairie View A&M Univeristy’s Agriculture and Business Multipurpose Building, Dr. Deland Myers understands that much of the vital support work of PVAMU’s Integrated Food Security Research Center (IFSRC) is alleviating issues of food insecurity in Texas and beyond.

“When we talk about attacking food insecurity, we have to harness this whole campus because there are individuals who may be doing work helping to solve food insecurity in their own disciplines that are vital to our work,” says Myers, who established IFSRC after being awarded a $5.3 million grant from the Texas A&M University Systems Chancellor’s Research Initiative (CRI) in 2018. As a research science leader in food systems in the College of Agriculture and Human Sciences, Myers brings to the IFSRC decades of experience teaching more than 25 different courses in food science and nutrition at three universities, as well as international experience in education and research. The Center plans to combine rigorous research and state-of-the-art facilities to, 1) become a repository of information about food security; 2) encourage and foster interdisciplinary research on food security; 3) support the education of professionals about food security; and 4) support outreach in the region and throughout the state to prevent food insecurity.

“

When we talk about attacking food insecurity, we have to harness this whole campus because there are individuals who may be doing work helping to solve food insecurity in their own disciplines that are vital to our work.

”

DELAND MYERS, PH. D. COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND HUMAN SCIENCES INTEGRATED FOOD SECURITY RESEARCH CENTER (IFSRC)

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In 2018, an estimated one in nine Americans were food insecure – roughly 37 million Americans, including more than 11 million children. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for active, healthy living. Global food insecurity is exacerbated by challenges of climate change and urbanization, Myers says, which impacts the kind of food that can be grown and where. Those realities, coupled with a growth in population from today’s 7.7 billion to an estimated 10 billion by 2050, only make the necessity of solving food insecurity more critical. Texas is one of the nation’s top five food-insecure states, and PVAMU has extension offices in 35 of the 96 counties in Texas with persistent poverty with the goal of eliminating food insecurity in the state and region. “Our mission is to meet the needs of the underserved and the low-resource farmers in Texas,” Myers says. “Prairie View has the resources, some smart people and the mandated mission to do it.” Myers believes it is important to begin discussions that foster multidisciplinary solutions across the entire campus for solving food insecurity. For example, he believes educators have a vital role in solving food insecurity because they teach students who struggle to sit still and stay focused on learning because they’re hungry. He sees the importance of engaging researchers and students in nursing, who are focused on eliminating chronic disease – such as diabetes or high blood pressure – issues related in part to the food people consume. Enlisting those in criminal justice studies should involve discussions about why juveniles and others commit crimes like shoplifting, and how those crimes might be connected to issues of food insecurity and stealing for basic survival.

Architecture plays a role in eliminating food insecurity by generating ideas about how to use green spaces and how to build structures that, for example, could support rooftop gardens for fresh fruit and vegetables in neighborhoods designated as food deserts. Students and researchers in business could help by developing innovative models that help entrepreneurs launch grocery stores in underserved communities in a way that is profitable. “The bottom line is: We have to get creative in solving problems around food access and involve a number of voices in the conversations,” Myers says. “Those are things I like to think about and the things I like to question. It’s a multidisciplinary effort.” IFSRC operates from the philosophy that food insecurity solutions lie in addressing issues all along the food “ecosystem” – from the farm to the table. That means involving researchers and students in fertile soil loss studies or examining the availability of water in certain regions to grow food. It means understanding that plant choices have to be made strategically, determining what types of vegetation to grow and where to grow it best, as well as introducing specialty crops of fruits and vegetables – like sweet potatoes or medicinal plants – into new regions. Beyond plants, researchers have to give consideration to how to maximize the use of animals in the food system, such as focusing on goats – which are less selective in their grazing habits than cows – particularly in areas where grazing spaces have become more scarce because of climate change and urbanization. Finally, focus must be given to post-harvest concerns in the food ecosystem, involving choices on where food is stored, where and how it is shipped efficiently to reduce spoilage or waste, and how areas can shift their focus

“

Our mission is to meet the needs of the underserved and low-resource farmers in Texas,” Myers says. “Prairie View has the resources, some smart people and the mandated mission to do it.

”

to locally grown food to shorten the farm to table cycle. While other schools might stop at the use of technical science in solving the challenges of the food ecosystem, Myers says social sciences such as economics or the study of culture have a role in helping address food insecurity. Economics is important to the process in creating food affordability. If food is too expensive, for example, then the chance of eliminating food insecurity in low-income communities is futile. Sociologists and psychologists in social science are significant in helping to address issues of culture and breaking down barriers and resistance to certain foods that appear “foreign,” such as introducing orange or purple sweet potatoes into cultures where white potatoes are the norm. It wouldn’t be hyperbole to state that Myers thinks the impact of the IFSRC could be out of this world. That is why he is encouraging his team to start thinking about ways to ensure food security for astronauts in space and growing safe food in space through partnerships with NASA and Houston’s Johnson Space Center. “We ultimately want to be that center that, when people Google food security, we are one of the first places that pops up,” Myers says. “We want to be the repository of research and information about all aspects of food insecurity.”

With the original Texas A&M University System Chancellor’s Research Initiative funds, Myers expects to continue focusing on building and facility renovations, including additional labs and conference spaces, as well as working with the College of Agriculture to create a Prairie View creamery for yogurt and ice cream. Other plans include bringing on a chief scientist, a post-harvest research area focused on food processing, as well as investments in a food safety lab and food safety research. The expectation for the original seed money from the funding was that the IFSRC would become self-sustaining with the ability to attract grants from entities such as the USDA, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, as well as from companies and foundations like the W.K. Kellogg and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations. Though it has global ambitions, the IFSRC understands that its primary mission first must be solving food insecurity to improve the circumstances of low-resourced individuals and farmers right in its own backyard in the region and the state. The state’s topography, geography and diversity – with varied climates, rainfall, vegetation, cultures, population density and scarcity, keep scientists and researchers like Myers pushing for multidisciplinary and creative approaches to problems in the food ecosystem. “World food insecurity issues are complex, but even here in our own region we can’t look at solving food insecurity with a broad-brush solution,” Myers says. “The solutions for small town rural areas such as Hempstead, Waller and Prairie View may not be the same challenges that face urban areas in Houston. Food insecurity is complicated and not a simple matter. That’s the challenge that we face every day.” o

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INNOVATING THE FUTURE

N, IO T A V O N IN R O F D RWAR O F H T A P E H IP AND T H S G R IN U E N PAV E R P E R T N, EN IO T A IZ L IA C R E M COM D) E E IC ( T N E M P O L E ECONOMIC DEV ., M.B.A. VICE PRESIDENT – RESEARCH & INNOVATION N, PH.D., P.E DR. MAGESH RAJA

In a bold move designed to boost regional economic development enterprise at Prairie View A&M University, Dr. Magesh Rajan, vice president for research and innovation, has created the infrastructure to strengthen the innovation, commercialization, entrepreneurship and economic development enterprise for innovators and researchers. He has brought together a team of experts to extend innovations in research laboratories and ideas from laboratories into the marketplace to support regional economic development. The Office of Innovation, Commercialization, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development (I-CEED) takes the best of what’s already in existence across the university in the innovation, commercialization and entrepreneurial space and pairs those efforts with resources and expertise to help get ideas patented so that they can be licensed to start and grow new businesses. The team will cultivate an ecosystem that galvanizes researchers to make their research projects available in global commercial markets where they can impact lives.

This new approach will ultimately elevate innovation to commercialization and entrepreneurship, which helps boost economic development and job creation in the region and the state – the end goal of a vibrant innovation ecosystem. o

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THE TEAM WILL CULTIVATE AN ECOSYSTEM THAT GALVANIZES RESEARCHERS TO MAKE THEIR RESEARCH PROJECTS AVAILABLE IN GLOBAL COMMERCIAL MARKETS WHERE THEY CAN IMPACT LIVES.

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DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION AND COMMERCIALIZATION Dr. April Lovelady has been appointed to serve as the director for innovation and commercialization. Dr. Lovelady earned her Ph.D. at Texas A&M University and is currently a faculty member in the mechanical engineering department at PVAMU. She has been actively involved in the areas of commercialization from research and innovation endeavors. She has also served as a mentor for Startup Aggieland Incubator, an organization focused on training aspiring entrepreneurs. As a graduate of the Texas Medical Center Accelerator (TMCX) program, she also specializes in medical device commercialization. In her new role, Lovelady will support PVAMU innovators by guiding them through the Texas A&M System innovation and commercialization processes. Her knowledge and experience will help to expand PVAMUâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intellectual property (IP) portfolio, and increase the number of licensed early-stage technologies. o

DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP Dr. Rick Baldwin has been appointed to serve as the director for innovation and entrepreneurship under the Division of Research and Innovation at PVAMU. Dr. Baldwin is a leading faculty member of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program in the College of Business at PVAMU, and he is also a business development consultant. In his new role, Baldwin will be assisting to elevate innovation and entrepreneurship activities of faculty, staff and students at PVAMU. During his long tenure at PVAMU, Baldwin has served in several roles, including as a faculty member in the College of Business, Director of Community and Economic Development Graduate Program in the School of Architecture, and Economic Development Specialist in the Cooperative Extension Program. In addition to his involvement at PVAMU, Dr. Baldwin has prepared both graduate and undergraduate students for business ventures and business case competitions at national and international collegiate competitions. o

DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT Dr. Rebecca Faison has been appointed to serve as the director for innovation and economic development. Dr. Faison is currently serving as the Director of Continuing Education at PVAMU. She has been actively involved in several economic development organizations in the Greater Houston region. She has been involved in the planning processes for PVAMU innovation and economic development initiatives. Previously, she has served as the director for the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) at Prairie View. With her stewardship, several clients have successfully converted their ideas to marketable products and services contributing to economic development. Faison holds a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Florida, an executive MBA from PVAMU, and a Ph.D. in educational leadership with a concentration in higher education from PVAMU. Her research interest is the attainment of economic sustainability in under-represented communities through the medium of university engagement. Her research focus is germane to higher education leadership ecosystems as it relates to the innovation and commercialization of research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities. o

DIRECTOR OF INNOVATION-ECOSYSTEM Dr. Anil Kumar has been appointed to serve as the director for innovation-ecosystem. Dr. Kumar is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at PVAMU and has done extensive study of innovation systems and technology transfer practices â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in industrial and academic environments. In his new role, he will begin implementing university-wide programs and training based on the principles of innovation, entrepreneurship, technology transfer, and commercialization. He aims to establish an innovation ecosystem that draws on the current and potential ideas among the faculty and student researchers and innovators at PVAMU, and in partnerships with various players, stakeholders and community members that are critical for innovation. Kumar previously served PVAMU as the director of research and special assistant to the president for science and technology. He completed a feasibility study of business and technology incubators at HBCUs and has submitted large scale, multi-industry, multi-university collaborative proposals to establish contracting vehicles with DISA and the US Army CECOM. Kumar has also established a Small Business Mentoring Program to assist small businesses to respond to SBIR and STTR initiatives. With his graduate students, based on his research, he has developed three products, two software, and one hardware that have the potential for technology transfer and commercialization. o

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NEW VASCULAR IMPLANT DEVICE

K C I T S E L D E E N E T A N I M I L E D L COU S I S Y L A I D F O S CHALLENGE DY, Ph.D. DR. APRIL LOVELA

ESSOR – ASSISTANT PROF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING OF T EN M DEPART

RESEARCHER’S COLLABORATION IS EXAMPLE OF ICEED’S MODEL FOR SUCCESS Dr. April Lovelady epitomizes what Prairie View A&M University is seeking to accomplish with the new Office of Innovation, Commercialization, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Development (I-CEED). Part engineer and part entrepreneur, Lovelady combines technical expertise with tenacious start-up resourcefulness in her work on testing and refining a medical device that will transform the way in which dialysis is done.

She is testing a vascular access device that will make it easier for health care professionals and nurses to become more precise in knowing where to stick needles into patients for dialysis. The device is surgically placed just below the skin, and provides a palpable target for dialysis nurses to feel, showing them precisely where to stick the needle. In essence, this device is a “one-stick, no miss” solution that prevents missed puncture attempts. The implant provides an exoskeleton that reinforces the strength of the vein, improving patient comfort, and eliminating many of the common complications associated with vascular access.

L O V E L A DY C O M B I N E S TECHNICAL EXPERTISE W I T H T E N A C I O U S S TA RT- U P RESOURCEFULNESS IN HER WORK Because dialysis requires access to veins hundreds of times per year, and the needles used in the process are large, missing the vein and multiple sticks is not only painful, but can result in scarring and trauma to the vein rendering the access site no longer usable. At PVAMU, Lovelady is currently testing the device in collaboration with the inventor, a medical doctor; the start-up company that will market the device; and other health professionals who provide direct end-user perspective, such as dialysis nurses. The vascular access device may prove invaluable beyond clinical and in-hospital settings by allowing home dialysis patients the potential to better self-cannulate when they insert needles themselves during the dialysis process. Not only is the device designed to help with their confidence and eliminate mistakes and multiple sticks, it also helps open the possibility for daily dialysis in an in-home setting. That means transportation issues of getting to a clinic are reduced, increasing adherence and more frequent dialysis for a better quality of life.

Eventually, the device will move to human trials and U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance. If all goes well, Lovelady anticipates the device will be ready to go to market in about two years. Her work exemplifies the innovation, commercialization and entrepreneurship model of ICEED. “Every good idea doesn’t make a good product,” says Lovelady, a Crockett, Texas, native, and Texas A&M University graduate. “You have to have a good idea that people want to buy and use – and have a plan in place to purchase.” She has received funding support through a Prairie View faculty development grant and external sponsored research funds from the startup bringing the device to market. ICEED’s process for getting innovation to the marketplace in a systematic fashion is the way of the future for Prairie View. Even as Lovelady is modeling to her students the value of the innovation and entrepreneurship through her work, she also is learning. “It’s really been like learning a new language,” Lovelady says. “I’ve had to learn how to communicate in the language of doctors. I’ve had to communicate in the language of business, discussing reimbursement codes and revenue-generating models. I’ve had to go to dialysis clinics and learn how to communicate with patients who tell me their challenges and ask, ‘Can you eliminate my pain point?’ “It’s all about working to fix problems and eliminating pain points at every level of the process. To do that, I’ve had to learn different operation languages to understand problems to be able to develop a solution.” o

THE IMPLANT PROVIDES AN EXOSKELETON THAT REINFORCES THE STRENGTH OF THE VEIN, IMPROVING PATIENT COMFORT

INNOVATION AT PVAMU:

A MULTIFUNCTIONAL SENSOR FOR DETECTION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC IONIZATION AND RADIATION ENVIRONMENTS ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR â&#x20AC;&#x201C; DR. SHUZA BINZAID, Ph.D. RESEARCH ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

ELECTRONIC DEVICES, INCLUDING COMPUTERS CAN MALFUNCTION, AND EVEN CAUSE A CATASTROPHIC FAILURE DUE TO ELECTROMAGNETIC EMISSIONS, AND IONIZING RADIATION EFFECTS.

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DR. BINZAID HOPES THAT CONTINUED RESEARCH CAN DEVELOP APPLICATIONS TO SAVE LIVES EVEN FROM THUNDERSTRIKES DURING RAINY DAYS. Electronics devices, including computers can malfunction, and even cause a catastrophic failure due to electromagnetic emissions, and ionizing radiation effects. To protect health from such harmful environments of radiation and electromagnetic ionization at both the earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surface and in space (shown in the picture, A), it is most desirable to design a multifunctional sensor, a type of electronic component that can perform a number of detection tasks. At Prairie View A&M University, this innovative work has been conducted by Dr. Shuza Binzaid, a researcher at the SMART Center for renewable energy research who joined in September 2018.

surrounding air is also detected by this sensor accurately, took place in January 2020, and now Dr. Binzaid hopes that continued research can develop applications to save lives even from thunderstrikes during rainy days. Continuing his research in radiation effects, Dr. Binzaid is working on tuning this active sensor for the detection of very high-frequency electromagnetic energy emission for determination of close proximity. This will help many field workers and engineers of energy transmission systems. He has completed a preliminary test and results seem promising. o

Surrounding this new concept of the multifunctional sensors, Dr. Binzaid has been working since he joined PVAMU on various designs for the technology of Active Sensing based on various sizes, shapes, and composition of materials. Two of his sensors (shown in the pictures, B & C) are made from composite materials and have been found to be very promising. These have been tested extensively for radiation sensing under X-ray at PVAMU lab in the ECE department, and the energetic neutron particle tests at Los Alamos National Labs at New Mexico, that yielded very successful results in October 2019. Also, another setup of static energy tests at PVAMU, the build-up of ionization in the

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MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Engineering Team Awarded $3 Million Federal Grant to Construct New Center for Research on High Pressure Combustion DR. ZIAUL HUQUE Director – Center for High Pressure Combustion (CHPC) DR. YUHAO XU Associate Director – Center for High Pressure Combustion (CHPC) DR. PAUL BINEY Technical Coordinator – Center for High Pressure Combustion (CHPC)

The funding comes from NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Institutional Research Opportunity (MIRO) program, which supports the training and development of students and faculty at targeted colleges and universities. Fifty-six universities nationwide applied for the grant, and PVAMU was one of only eight selected, says Dr. Ziaul Huque, a professor in the College of Engineering. Huque leads a cross-departmental team at PVAMU that will establish what will be known as the Center for High Pressure Combustion (CHPC) in Microgravity. The CHPC’s work will focus on experimental and numerical investigations of liquid fuel combustion under high pressure representative of practical engines.

The CHPC will collaborate with NASA Glenn Research Center and three mentor universities — Cornell University, Georgia Tech University and Auburn University — to enhance PVAMU’s research capabilities in high-pressure combustion. “Students will get the opportunity to go to NASA Glenn Research Center and conduct experiments in NASA’s drop tower facility,” Huque notes. “The drop tower facility at NASA Glenn is one of only a few in this country.” With the $3 million grant, PVAMU will build its own drop tower facility, Huque adds. “With this funding, we will be building a drop tower facility here at Prairie View, and this will greatly enhance our research capabilities.”

Competing with universities nationwide, Prairie View A&M University’s College of Engineering recently secured a $3 million federal grant to construct a new center for research on high-pressure combustion in microgravity.

Huque, as the CHPC’s director, will lead numerical simulations. Dr. Yuhao Xu, the associate director, will oversee high-pressure combustion experiments. Dr. Paul Biney of the Mechanical Engineering Department, will serve as technical coordinator of the center. The CHPC will be funded by NASA to perform research on combustion of liquid droplet fuel in a high pressure environment. The initial research period is three years with the $3 million grant covering the full three-year period. There are eight faculty from three PVAMU colleges and four departments involved with the center. “This research has direct practical applications for increasing combustion efficiency, increasing engine efficiency and reducing fossil fuel emission,” Huque notes. The center has two technical research objectives and one educational objective.

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The first research objective is to build the drop tower experimental facility with a high pressure combustion apparatus which will enable the center researchers to perform experiments on combustion physics of liquid droplet combustion under high pressure and micro-gravity environment.

“Something unique about our program is that government agencies such as NASA are always interested in a comprehensive program that combines both experimental work and simulation capabilities,” says Xu, who is himself an alumnus of the NASA Glenn Research Center. “Not many universities have these capabilities.”

Once it is built and operational, the drop tower experimental facility will give PVAMU a rare advantage in research capabilities. Very few universities have their own drop tower facilities. The second research objective is to establish a computational framework to simulate combustion experiments at elevated pressures. The center’s educational objective is to develop a new master of science (MS) in mechanical engineering degree program at PVAMU. With dynamic growth in the past 10 years resulting in a current enrollment of about 500 undergraduate and graduate students, mechanical engineering is one of the largest programs at PVAMU. “Our students will have opportunities to go to the (mentor) universities of Cornell, Georgia Tech and Auburn for summer internships,” Xu notes.

The new center enables the university to greatly increase the inventory of research in the mechanical engineering department and provide a strong foundation for support of graduate students at the MS level.

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From an educational perspective, the broader impacts for the CHPC include activities to provide graduate students with the chance to gain new knowledge and explore practical applications, Huque notes, and also opportunities for undergraduate students to conduct independent research at an early stage of their careers. Moreover, the research program will enable various K-12 outreach opportunities from the PVAMU College of Engineering. The goal of these activities is to encourage more students to seek science and engineering careers and thus build a more diverse STEM workforce for NASA and the nation as a whole. o

“This funding is going to provide enough research funding to support students who feel that because we (mechanical engineering) are the largest department in the College of Engineering, we should have a master’s degree program,” Biney says.

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SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTUREâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT GRADUATE PROGRAM HELPS PRESERVE LEGACY OF PROUD HISTORICAL COMMUNITIES THAT ARE FORGOTTEN, OVERLOOKED

HOPE Tiffany Thomas, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, City Councilwoman, Community Development, School of Architecture

The church historically has been at the center of African American progress and community. When Tiffany D. Thomas and her students found themselves leading a large community development project to help save a historically African American neighborhood from gentrification, not surprisingly, the church was at the center of their work.

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PINEY POINT,

A HOUSTON NEIGHBORHOOD THAT HAS ROOTS AS A FREEDOM COLONY

Thomas, an assistant professor of Community Development in the School of Architecture, and her students have been working to help residents of Piney Point. Piney Point, a Houston neighborhood that has roots as a freedom colony, needed support to find their voice to halt gentrification, seek long-overdue infrastructure improvements and document the historical legacy of the area. Thomas and her students’ efforts are funded by a mini-grant from the USDA/ NIFA Higher Education Challenge Grant for Innovative Community Development Education, which offers federal funds to define the pedagogy and training for best-practices in community development. At the heart of Piney Point is Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church, which dates to 1865. It is one of the oldest African American churches in Houston. Piney Point Elementary school rests on land that freed slaves donated to Houston Independent School District for a school that still exists today. Helping to document Piney Point’s history is only part of Thomas’ work. The primary goal is to arm long-time African American and elderly residents with the information they need to approach city government and law enforcement to make data-informed requests for much-needed city services and other improvements. Many of the current residents are descendants of the founders of the community, and the majority of them own their lots.

“WE’RE ALWAYS GOING TO ADVOCATE FOR THE COMMUNITY AND THE MOST VULNERABLE”

THOMAS BRINGS A WEALTH OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZING AND ADVOCACY WORK TO PVAMU

Now, many of the elderly people of color who often “don’t have language, don’t have context and don’t have knowledge of how to navigate the system” are facing squatters or being manipulated into signing over their property to commercial developers, Thomas says. That’s when Thomas and her students step in. “Our program is different in that we’re always going to advocate for the community and the most vulnerable because they often lack the infrastructure and information to accomplish what they need,” says Thomas, whose Community Development Graduate Program is the only Master of Science in Community Development program in Texas and the only one at an HBCU. Thomas is a graduate of the program and was part of the first graduating class. The program will celebrate 20 years in 2020. Thomas brings a wealth of community organizing and advocacy work to PVAMU. She has worked with the Urban League, as well as served as a trustee with Alief Independent School District. She first began working at PVAMU as an adjunct and became a full-time tenure-track professor in 2018 with a research focus on citizen-led community development and community-engaged research practices.

“Piney Point is never in the news and no one is talking about environmental justice or any issue for that matter for them,” she says. “They’re unknown and they’re forgotten. That’s why we leveraged our program to help them advocate for change on things that matter to them. There’s a story there. They need a voice and their story needs to be told on a larger scale.”

“THEY NEED A VOICE AND THEIR STORY NEEDS TO BE TOLD ON A LARGER SCALE.”

When people think of “community development,” they often think about housing — exclusively, Thomas says, but at PVAMU, community development is much broader, aligning with economic development. The program teaches fundamentals around real estate, historic preservation, community leadership, community development politics and community research. The program fuses a variety of disciplines, including community development, research, community advocacy, architecture and GIS data mapping. The School of Architecture broadly offers undergraduate degrees in architecture, construction science and digital media arts. On the graduate side are degrees in architecture and community development. “Our students come to us from a broad interdisciplinary background – some are professionals, some are mid-career professionals, some are retirees who want to pursue community as their path in whatever form that is,” Thomas says. “It’s a highly integrated program. The MCD really comes to life in class when you have students from social work, sociology, finance, real estate, architecture learning together. When you have all those elements in place, the final work product is off the charts. For many of our students, when they have that real-time experience working on a project like Piney Point, they start to say, ‘Yes, this is exactly what I want to do and why I chose this program. In my head I saw it, but now I get to touch it and talk about it.’” With her Introduction to Community Development and Community Research course, students apply classroom methodology in helping Piney Point stem aggressive gentrification. In some cases, commercial development, such

as mechanic shops, have sprouted up around residential homes, displacing people and destroying the historical roots of the community. Thomas has applied for grant funding to help place historical markers on significant structures in the neighborhood to halt the gentrification in what will likely be a two-year or more effort. In a truly interdisciplinary integrated approach, Thomas and other faculty decide on a theme for the year and synthesize the learning curriculum, where students benefit from shared experiences across disciplines working on a community initiative. Thomas and her students led the research and engagement into the community, while students in real estate and finance helped with assessing property land values, and architecture students examine the built environment. Thomas and her students are working with the Piney Point civic club to help them understand their community priorities through community meetings led by the residents, canvassing door to door to complete a survey and by reporting back the data-driven results to better inform the community of next steps to take, if they so choose. This past summer, Thomas and her students conducted a public safety study at the request of Park Glen West HOA, a neighborhood in Alief known for the highest homicide rates in the city of Houston.

The class completed a digital map of unsafe apartment complexes and GIS mapped every pothole in a community that needs safety assessment. They also canvassed the neighborhood and knocked on doors to assess residents’ feelings about their safety. This work resulted in a presentation for the community, and serves as preliminary data she is using to apply for a grant to connect crime and social determinants of health. In support of Piney Point, Thomas is applying for a $24,000 capacity grant for disaster recovery planning, with drainage and asset mapping that will be key in pressing for capital improvements to prevent flooding. This work is particularly important to Thomas, who saw her childhood home in New Orleans destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

“WE’RE CREATING EXPERTS IN COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT AND RESEARCH, AND THEY ARE ABLE TO ARTICULATE IT IN A WAY NO ONE ELSE CAN. BECAUSE THEY ARE TRAINED AT PRAIRIE VIEW A&M.”

“Seniors deserve to be able to age in place, and so the focus must be on what protections need to be there to get them out safely, if necessary,” Thomas says. Another goal is completing a digital map of Piney Point to help document the community as it was 100 years ago and to better preserve its history. “I am a community-engaged scholar and I believe that academia has a meaningful place in the community. Prairie View A&M is in the best position to support the most under-served communities and people.”

“AtPineythe Point heart of is

Pilgrim Rest Missionary Baptist Church, which dates to 1865. It is one of the oldest African American churches in Houston.

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Beyond those goals, Thomas says she gets satisfaction in seeing her students begin to see their work not as “duty work” to save communities, but as meaningful research work that they can write about in case studies, publish and present, leading to further research to stretch their professional development. One architecture student from Port Arthur, for example, became interested in disaster recovery because she had personally witnessed three hurricanes devastate Southeast Texas. In her architecture studio class, she developed a redesign of Port Arthur and set up a meeting with city officials, offering information-based counsel that container homes, while popular and lower cost, were not a good fit for hurricane prone communities. City officials listened. “It’s not just duty work,” Thomas says. “We’re creating experts in community development and research, and they are able to articulate it in a way no one else can because they are trained at Prairie View A&M.” o

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STEM SELL: NEW $1 MILLION SCHOLARSHIP PROGRAM AIMS TO ATTRACT BRIGHTEST STEM SCHOLARS TO PVAMU THROUGH ADDITIONAL FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE When it comes to persistence and patience, biology professor and principal investigator (PI) Gloria Regisford, Ph.D., can proudly boast that she and her four co-PIs found the right formula to secure $1 million in scholarships through a grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The winning project, “Fostering Student Success and Diversity in STEM by Combining Scholarship Support with Mentoring and Research Engagement,” is expected to bring in its first cohort of S-STEM scholars to the PVAMU campus in 2020.

Over its five-year duration, this project will fund four-year scholarships for 20 students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology, chemistry, physics (not offered as a major, just a class) or mathematics. The program will focus on academically talented, low-income students and will provide scholarships between $5,000-$10,000.

Regisford, who joined the Brailsford College of Arts & Sciences in 1997, articulated two reasons that made a difference in the application receiving acceptance for the funds the fourth time around.

“We received a lot of institutional support in the form of letters from President [Ruth] Simmons, Provost [James] Palmer, Dean [Danny R.] Kelley (Brailsford College of Arts and Sciences) and Dean [Pamela Holland] Obiomon (Roy G. Perry College of Engineering),” she said. “Also, our diverse team of scientists persevered, working even more diligently and cohesively this year.” The cross-functional team includes Alphonso Keaton, Ph.D., associate professor in biology, Office of Undergraduate Studies; Orion Ciftja, Ph.D., professor in chemistry and physics; James Valles, Ph.D., an associate professor in mathematics, and Fred Bonner II, Ed.D., College of Education professor and chief scientist of the Minority Achievement, Creativity and High-Ability Center (MACH-III). While Bonner will focus on the educational research component, the other four scientists will concentrate on recruiting incoming freshman for the fall 2020 and 2021 cohorts of 10 students each year. The S-STEM scholars will get financial aid from the university, Regisford said, but the student may still need some additional funds to cover college expenses. When it comes to filling that financial gap, the new scholarship funds could mean the difference between a promising minority student enrolling at PVAMU or considering an offer from a competing institution. “That’s the challenge we’re facing now,” said Keaton, who’s been with PVAMU for 21 years. “We need to increase the academic profile of our students and recruit top-notch students. This grant allows us to do so.” With the award in hand, the S-STEM recruitment strategy includes visiting Waller, Hempstead, Cy-Fair, Houston and Aldine school districts and then branching out to Dallas. The university will use creative recruitment to bring STEM to potential students.

“We’re going to use our Mobile STEM vehicle,” Keaton said. “It’s a van that’s equipped to do experimentation on wheels. So, we’re going to roll up on those high school campuses, bring students out to the parking lot, and we will perform experiments in chemistry, biology, physics and even math.” The scholarship effort aims to increase student enrollment, retention and persistence. It also seeks to improve four-year graduation rates by linking these scholarships with effective supporting activities, such as cohort-building, undergraduate research experiences, mentoring, graduate school preparation, and participation in discipline-specific conferences. In addition, as a cohort, the S-STEM scholars will take calculus; become engaged in hypothesis-driven research during the academic year or summer, and attend professional skills development workshops. Regisford said she and her team hope that the S-STEM activities will increase retention rates in science, decrease time to graduation to four or five years and promote matriculation into a STEM graduate program or employment in the STEM workforce. “We want to institutionalize all the activities,” Regisford said. “In addition to the scholarship, we’re going to implement a strong mentoring program. Our science faculty will mentor the S-STEM scholars, in addition to scientists from industry and government, as well as their peers.” Keaton said the S-STEM scholars will have an impact on students across the university. “Those scholars will be responsible for mentoring other students who are not directly associated with the program,” he explained. “It’s going to be like a domino effect: Those students will branch out and impact other students.” o

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STUDENT SPOTLIGHT

Stephen Aisabokhae

Diana Varela Ajche

INTERNATIONAL GRAD STUDENT ADAPTS TO CULTURE, RAPIDLY ADVANCES TOWARD PROMISING CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

HONDURAN NATIVE ADJUSTS TO NEW NATION WHILE LAUNCHING A PROMISING CAREER IN SCIENCE

Stephen Aisabokhae is an international student at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU). He has a unique composition of academic backgrounds, including a bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University of Abuja in Nigeria and a master’s degree in community development from PVAMU while currently working as a doctoral student in the Educational Leadership program.

Diana Varela Ajche is a junior biology major at Prairie View A&M University. She is originally from a small village in Honduras. At age 13, Ajche embarked on a three months-long journey to the U.S. in 2005. Soon, she enrolled in Cypress Ridge High School. Following graduation, Ajche enrolled at Texas State Technical College to obtain a degree in applied science and medical assisting.

“My experience so far at PVAMU is exciting as the university community is friendly and welcoming,” said Aisabokhae. “I always tell my friends, PVAMU is a home away from home, and that is why I love it here.”

“I experienced some challenges, such as language barriers and adaptation, while going to high school and community college as a firstgeneration immigrant,” Ajche said. “In 2018, I was fortunate to meet my mentor, Dr. Gloria C. Regisford, who eventually recommended me to the Office of Undergraduate Research, where I earned a paid research assistant position.

Aisabokhae added that being from a developing nation and growing up in a multi-ethnic society prepared him to adapt and thrive in new cultural spaces as well as embrace change. “My navigation through the culture at PVAMU was smooth,” Aisabokhae said. “With the help of faculty and staff who embraced me and appreciated my uniqueness.”

“I am honored and appreciative to be part of such a fantastic program that not only provides me financial stability but also allows me to be exposed to the beauty of research at such an early stage in my academic journey,” Ajche said.

Publisher: Magesh Rajan, Ph.D., P.E., M.B.A. Vice President Research & Innovation Editor: Karen B. Cotton, M.A. Manager Office of Marketing and Communications Photographer: Michael Starghill Photography

Design and Contributors: Gilbreath Communications, Inc.

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