Alumni Magazine/Spring 2019

Texas Tech University

Arts

Sciences Spring 2019

REAL LIFE SUPERHERO SivaTeja Pati’s 3D-printed hands are giving children mobility they have never experienced before—proving not all superheroes wear capes.

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Unmasking Innovation: An Evening with George W. Bush

The College of Arts & Sciences hosted George W. Bush, the 43rd President of the United States, for an evening fund-raiser on April 26, 2018, at the Hyatt Regency Dallas. Pictured from left to right are Texas Tech President Dr. Lawrence Schovanec, Dean of Arts & Sciences W. Brent Lindquist, President Bush and former Texas Tech Chancellor Robert Duncan.

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Texas Tech University

Arts

Sciences Spring 2019

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14 FEATURES A Sense of Urgency 14 Microchips may dramatically reduce diagnosis times for sepsis and cancer An Evening With 43 17 President George W. Bush served as the keynote speaker for a capital campaign event in Dallas

On The Cover

SivaTeja Pati Photo by Ashley Rodgers

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Deadly Force 20 Chris Weiss and the Atmospheric Science team are working diligently on VORTEX-SE

20 Real Life Superhero 24 SivaTeja Pati’s 3D-printed hands are making an impact in the lives of children Unique Perspectives 29 Four Arts & Sciences students have vastly different journeys but all are achieving at the highest levels Videogames & English Composition? 34 Kendall Gerdes’ innovative teaching techniques are taking classroom instruction to a different level

ARTS & SCIENCES EDITOR Blayne Beal ‘99 Director of Marketing & Communications blayne.beal@ttu.edu ASSOCIATE EDITOR Toni Salama Senior Editor PHOTOGRAPHY Blayne Beal ‘99, Arts & Sciences Ian Halperin ‘90, Freelance Logan Hawk ‘17, TTU Athletics Artie Limmer, ‘82, TTUS IA Ashley Rodgers ‘04, TTU OC&M Toni Salama, Arts & Sciences Michael Strong ‘03, Freelance CONTRIBUTORS Glenys Young, Texas Tech OC&M Brandon Rawe, Rawe Yates Media

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AROUND A&S

KEEP IN TOUCH

Andrew Littlefield 37

Update Your Information Have you updated your mailing address or email address recently with Texas Tech or the College of Arts & Sciences? If not, please take a few moments and reach out so that we can update your information. Here’s how: Email us: as.development@ttu.edu Call us: 806.834.4754 Update Online: artsandsciences.ttu.edu/connect Upcoming Events: artsandsciences.ttu.edu/events

Around the College 6/38 Find out what’s going on across our 15 departments Distinguished Alumni 44 The 2018 class included Holly Hunt, A. Wess Mitchell, Charles R. Smith and David W. Trice Alumni Events 46 Time Capsule 48

DEAN W. Brent Lindquist brent.lindquist@ttu.edu ASSOCIATE DEANS Nural Akchurin Stefanie Borst Jorge Iber Randy McBee David Roach ALUMNI RELATIONS Cathey Durham Diretor of Alumni Relations cathey.durham@ttu.edu 806.834.4754 Kelly Cooper Coordinator DEVELOPMENT Colleen Sisneros ‘08/‘12 Director of Development colleen.sisneros@ttu.edu 806.834.5518 Katelyn Perry ‘13/‘18 Director of Development katelyn.perry@ttu.edu 806.834.2132 Spring 2019 /

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From The Dean

An Engaged Alumni Base Is Key To Our Success

BY W. BRENT LINDQUIST In the 96-year history of Texas Tech University, one could argue that there has been no better time to be a Red Raider. Record enrollment, world-renowned research, achieving status as a Hispanic-serving institution, and the success of our athletics teams have put Texas Tech in the national conversation.

As the largest College on the Texas Tech campus, our students, student-athletes, faculty and staff are playing an integral role in the success of this university. With 11,000-plus students and more than 600 faculty and staff, the College of Arts & Sciences is the heartbeat of this campus and our responsibility is great.

Since coming to Texas Tech as the Dean of Arts & Sciences in 2014, it has been my goal to raise the reputation of this College, to more widely share our many accomplishments and develop meaningful relationships with our alumni. I truly believe that for us to achieve our goals as a College, we must have an engaged alumni base.

When I visit with alumni all across the country, they remark time and again about their experience at Texas Tech and how transformative it was both for their life and their career. It was on this campus that lifelong friendships were forged; mentors were found; and a sense of purpose was discovered, embraced and allow to flourish.

As you turn the pages of this magazine and learn about the incredible accomplishments of our students and 6

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faculty, it is my hope that you will be inspired to become active in the College so that you can help us produce the next generation of Red Raiders that will go out into the world and make a difference.

Our alumni relations and development team have done a remarkable job of creating events all across the state of Texas to help bring our alumni together. Each year we are hosting receptions, game-watching parties, tailgates and even galas in cities like Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, El Paso, and Lubbock. While Texas is our home turf, we have even held alumni events in Washington, D.C., and New York City in each of the last two years.

In December, we hosted alumni for the Texas Tech-Duke basketball game at Madison Square Garden, and afterward we held a reception for ALL Texas Tech Alumni. At that reception, over 600 Red Raiders turned out to help us celebrate our College, Texas Tech University and of course the success of our men’s basketball team. Singing the Matador Song with fellow Red Raiders in a bar in Midtown Manhattan was something none of us who were in attendance will ever forget.

And speaking of events, go ahead and mark your calendars now for our Fifth Annual College of Arts & Sciences Alumni Tailgate on Saturday, Oct. 19, 2019, prior to the Texas Tech-Iowa State football game. The tailgate will take place on the North Lawn of Holden Hall and a $20 ticket will include live music, an all-you-can-eat buffet and beer and wine. Last year, more than 500 alumni and friends joined us prior to the Tech-OU game. It’s an event that you don’t want to miss.

As you can see there are plenty of ways for you engage for the first time or to re-engage with your home college.

When you invest your time and money back into the College of Arts & Sciences, you are helping to provide opportunities for future Red Raiders to make lifelong friendships and find their sense of purpose, just as you did.

W. Brent Lindquist is Dean of the Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences.

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ARTS & SCIENCES

BY THE NUMBERS

11,319 Students Enrolled

(Largest College on Campus)

89 14 Degree Programs

Doctoral Programs

610 Faculty & Staff Members

Departments

Biological Sciences q Chemistry & Biochemistry q Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures q Economics q English q Environmental Toxicology q Geosciences q Kinesiology & Sport Management q History q Mathematics & Statistics q Philosophy q Physics & Astronomy q Political Science q Psychological Sciences q Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work q

Fall Enrollment 2018 College of Arts & Sciences

Texas Tech University

Graduate

Undergraduate

Total Enrollment

Law

Graduate

Undergraduate

Total Enrollment

1,277

10,042

11,319

417

5,835

31,957

38,209

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ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

Left to right: Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, co-director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University; Director-General Jose Graziano da Silva, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations; Bjorn Hallvard Samset, Research Director at CICERO, Center for Climate Research; Dr. Thina Margrethe Saltvedt, Head of the Sustainable Finance Division of Nordea Bank, Norway; Professor Ricarda Winkelmann, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. They are at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo.

On The Global Stage POLITICAL SCIENCE Katharine Hayhoe, professor in the Department of Political Science and co-director of TTU’s Climate Science Center, joined other world leaders on climate science, policy and solutions as part of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Forum in Oslo, Norway. The Dec. 11, 2018, forum, titled “How to Solve the Climate Crisis in Time,” followed the keynote speech delivered by former U.S. vice president and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore.

“I’m honored to participate in this event, and I appreciate the decision of the Nobel Peace Prize Forum to use this event to highlight the urgency of a changing climate,” Hayhoe says. “A global conversation about how we can sensibly and safely accomplish this goal is exactly what we 8

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need right now.” Past keynote speakers for this event have included former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, a human rights activist from Guatemala. The forum was streamed live by Nobel Media and is accessible on YouTube.

A Super Startup SOCIOLOGY, ANTHROPOLOGY & SOCIAL WORK

Follow Us

first test couple will move into the home sometime during the summer of 2019.

Dr. Carol Lindquist (Left) and Dr. Brian Ancell (Right)

Atmospheric scientist Brian Ancell, from the Department of Geosciences, and sociologists Carol Lindquist and Nadia Y. Flores-Yeffal, both from the Department of Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work, are on a research team that is equipping a mobile home for sustainability. Their project, the Home Utility Management System (HUMS), will fit a manufactured home with solar panels, a wind turbine, and a water collection system. There’ll be ample battery storage for the electricity and a storage tank for the water. All of this will tie in to computerized monitoring for smarter management of the resources. A “test couple” will live in the home, set up on TTU’s Junction Campus, to discover whether the arrangement truly is livable. The goal is to offer a turn-key, off-the-grid utility option for middle class homeowners—in fact, whole communities— that is affordable and harmonious with everyday life. If all goes according to plan, the

A Super Startup ENGLISH

Want to stay up to date with all the latest happenings in the College of Arts & Sciences? Follow us on social media through Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Brian Still, English professor and chair, has invented eye-tracking technology that made it to the finals at the Super Bowl’s 1st and Future Super Bowl startup competition 2018, sponsored by the NFL, Comcast NBCUniversal and the Mayo Clinic. Still is the founder of a startup company called EyeGuide, Inc., which makes the EyeGuide Focus—a proprietary hardware and software platform that allows professionals to easily administer a simple, 10-second test to check for potential neurological impairment such as concussion. “Focus works. You can use it on the sidelines or in the locker room. You can use it for any sport. It works for detection and recovery. It’s a thermometer for the brain. It isn’t the only solution, but it is a fast, reliable one that should go in the tool kit for concussion management.” The invention-to-commercialization process isn’t quick or cheap. But the exposure at the Super Bowl competition “allows us to get the investor interest and money we need to get Focus made and into the hands of athletic trainers, coaches and physicians,” Still says. “This product will benefit those who end up using it.”

@TTUArtsSciences

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ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

Award Winning Research ENVIRONMENTAL TOXICOLOGY Kamaleshwar Singh, an associate professor in the Department of Environmental Toxicology, and doctoral candidate Yu-Wei Chang have found that relatively low levels of arsenic may still be enough to cause kidney disease. After two years of research, Singh and Chang published in the Journal of Cellular Physiology that allowable levels of arsenic—the Environmental Protection Agency limit in drinking water is 10 parts per billion—can represent chronic exposure that injures the kidneys repeatedly, leading to the development of chronic kidney disease, an irreversible condition for which there is no current treatment.

Chronic kidney disease is progressive and leads to kidney failure. Worst case: kidney fibrosis, when kidney cells begin producing abnormally high levels of a protein that blocks the kidney from filtering blood of toxins. But there is some good news.

“Interestingly, our study also showed that these fibrosis-related 10 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

changes in kidney cells can be reversed back to normal kidney cells by an FDA-approved drug that is currently used for blood cancer,” Singh says. Before they can approach the FDA to propose using the medication for kidney disease treatment, they must clinically test both the dose and the efficacy of the drug on rodents with kidney fibrosis due to arsenic exposure.

Studying Abroad CLASSICAL & MODERN LANGUAGES & LITERATURES Callyn Hale, Madison Kennedy and Ryan Pardo were among a group of students who went beyond the classroom—all the way to Amman, Jordan—to immerse themselves in the Arabic language and Jordanian culture. They traveled over summer 2018 through the Department of Classical & Modern Languages & Literatures’ Arabic language study abroad program. Rula Al-Hmoud, program director and instructor, said, “It was very satisfying for me that my students were able to experience what I try to explain to them in the classroom and watch it play out in real life.” In addition to practicing Arabic with local speakers, sampling authentic cuisine, and encountering different customs and traditions, the students visited world class historical sites.

Hale, a sociology/anthropology major, found the experience “surreal and life changing.” She’d scarcely been outside of Texas before this trip but, she said, “I came back to the States a completely new person. I was more educated in religion, culture, humanity, and myself.” Kennedy, a psychology major with an Arabic minor, also spoke of her experience in terms of personal growth. “Not only did I learn more about the culture and

Sexism In STEM CHEMISTRY & BIOCHEMISTRY Miranda C. Andrews is a Ph.D. student conducting research on photoswitchable molecules in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry. But Andrews conducts additional, and very different, research as well and presents it to other millennials, other scientists, other women—borne out of her own run-ins with attitudes and behavior patterns encountered by many females in just about any setting: sexism. Andrews’ most recent talks were given here at Texas Tech on “A Millennial’s Perspective on Sexism in STEM.” In a nutshell, Andrews describes her talks this way: “While instances of blatant sexism still occur, they seem few and far between. Most of the sexism that is experienced by young women today is a result of implicit bias, those thoughts that we as a society grow up learning to have.

The STEM field in particular is full of opportunities for young women to wonder, ‘Did that happen because I am a woman or am I just imagining things?’ This is a good sign, but it also means that the work we have to do to level the playing field for women in science will be that much harder. We have to root out that implicit bias, which is one of the most difficult types of bias to overcome.”

how to fight and break stereotypes once returning to the United States, but I learned about myself as a person,” Kennedy said.

Pardo, who is pursuing a major in global studies with an Arabic minor, wasn’t sure what to expect. “The first week in was hectic, thinking about how to adjust to the culture. By the second week I realized that Jordanian culture takes little to no adjustment. Jordanian people are some of the most hospitable in the world,” he said.

Ribeiro Is Heading To Vienna PHILOSOPHY Anna Ribeiro, an associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, will be a guest professor of aesthetics at the University of Vienna in the summer of 2019. Ribeiro specializes in aesthetics and the philosophy of art and currently is a trustee of the American Society for Aesthetics (2017-2020). Most of her work has focused on a philosophical analysis of poetry; and she has written the entries on poetry for The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Literature (2016), The Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (2nd ed., 2014), and The Blackwell Companion to Aesthetics (2nd ed., 2009), as well as several journal articles and book chapters on the philosophy of poetry. Among her recognitions are the 2016 American Society for Aesthetics Ted Cohen Prize for “The Spoken and the Written: An Ontology of Poems” (in The Philosophy of Poetry, Oxford University Press 2015).

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ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

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The Class of 2022 The College of Arts & Sciences welcomed it’s largest first-year class ever for the Fall semester in 2018. A total of 2,364 first-year students enrolled in Arts & Sciences, surpassing the previous high of 2,247 set in Fall 2017.

64

Percent are Female

36

Percent are Male

50

Percent are Caucasian

36

Percent are Hispanic

7

Percent are African-American

7

Percent identify as Other

32

Percent are on the Pre-Professional Health track

17

Percent are majoring in Kinesiology or Sport Management

10

Percent are pursuing a degree in the humanities

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ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

A Galactic Discovery PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY Benjamin Owen and Alessandra Corsi, both astrophysicists in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, continue to make discoveries through a variety of terrestrial and celestial astronomical machinery and their association with LIGO—the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. (LIGO’s founders received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the detection of gravitational waves, confirming Einstein’s theory of the waves’ existence.) Among the breakthroughs Owen and Corsi have announced is the detection of gravitational waves from the merger of two neutron stars 130 million light years away, an event dubbed GW170817. Just 1.7 seconds after the GW170817 gravitational wave was detected, a NASA/Fermi satellite recorded the merger emitting a flash of gamma rays—the first direct proof that short gamma-ray bursts originate from binary neutron star mergers. X-rays showed up nine days later, and on the 16th day, Corsi’s team detected a radio signal from the event using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Those radio and X-ray observations became key to deciphering the mystery of 14 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

the too-dim gamma rays. “We thought it would be years before we could do it, but this one was so loud we actually got information on the structure of the neutron stars,” Owen says.

“Roughly speaking, we could tell the radius as well as the mass, and that tells us about matter under extreme conditions.” Every previous observation of gamma-ray bursts had involved a jet pointing from the source to Earth. Because in this event it took the X-rays and radio waves so much longer to reach Earth than the gamma rays and visible light, scientists now believe they are seeing the gamma ray burst from the side. “This is the first time a gamma-ray burst has been seen whose jet wasn’t directly pointed at Earth,” Corsi says.

NIH Internship BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES Moamen Elmassry, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Biological Sciences, landed a rare internship at the National Institutes of Health. Elmassry spent his internship in Washington, D.C., at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine. “I’ve always been fascinated by the way microbes live in harmony with the human body,” he says. “Considering that our bodies have 10 times more microbial cells than human cells, I was curious about the role microbes might play in the metabolism of drugs.”

Elmassry already has a pharmacy degree and was also interested in the role these microbes play in the metabolism of medications. This internship provided him with the resources and tools to discover that. “My research group was able to predict how certain microbes can break down specific medicines, and even determine the body’s response to drugs—for better and for worse.” Elmassry also worked on two other research projects during his internship.

In one project, he collaborated with eight other scientists to study how a virus might help lead to better treatment for typhoid fever. In another, he used computer modeling to study how the genetics of chickpeas might improve the plants’ resistance to heat and drought.

Children, Dogs and Play PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCES Jason Van Allen, an assistant professor and co-director of the Clinical Program in the Department of Psychological Sciences, is on a team of Texas Tech researchers who are studying the effects that pet dogs can have on children’s health. Van Allen, along with Nathaniel Hall, an assistant professor in the College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources’ (CASNR) Department of Animal & Food Sciences, is examining how the physical activity of preadolescent children who have a dog compares to the activity of those who do not. They’re also looking at how much the dog’s and child’s physical activities mesh with each other, and how much a child’s attachment to the dog determines the amount of physical activity they share. Given that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) show approximate-

ly 70 percent of children fail to meet the national recommendations for daily physical activity—and that statistics also show almost 32 percent of children age 2-19 are classified as either overweight or obese—Van Allen wanted to know if playing with the family pet could help prevent childhood obesity. “Our long-term goal with this study is for it to help us design better interventions to increase physical activity in children,” Van Allen said. “Our study may help us determine whether there are certain types of activities that children do with their dogs that result in more vigorous physical activity that increases their heart rate and is more beneficial for their health, or determine whether there are certain dog characteristics that are important for mutual activity.”

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A SENSE OF URGENCY Microchips may dramatically reduce diagnosis times for sepsis and cancer.

WRITTEN BY TONI SALAMA PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY RODGERS In the quest to beat cancer, the urgency is to detect its presence as early as possible. Until now, that has meant scientists must know exactly which type of cancer they are looking for, then run the specific test that would identify the presence of that exact type of cancer—or eliminate it as a suspect and continue with test after test.

Chemist Dimitri Pappas compares that detection method with having to know what sort of metal the needle is made of before sifting through the haystack. Now that Pappas has received a new CPRIT High-Impact/High-Risk Research Award, the days of hunt-and-peck cancer diagnostics appear to be numbered.

Pappas, an associate professor in Texas Tech University’s Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, was awarded $200,000 over two years from CPRIT—the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas—for his grant application entitled “Microfluidic Cancer Assay for Liquid Biopsies and Early Detection.” In lay terms, Pappas will be working to develop a new, quick and inexpensive method to look for the presence of cancer cells in blood and other body fluids, and it won’t matter which kind of cancer he looks for.

He describes the new method this way: “In leukemia, the presence of cancer cells in the blood is indicative of poor outcomes. In solid tumors, cancer cells that shed from the tumor enter the blood stream and spread to other parts of the body. The presence of cancer cells in blood, and other bodily fluids, can be used as a diagnostic called a ‘liquid biopsy.’”

Specifically, the goal of Pappas’ CPRIT work is to develop a new fluid microchip for early cancer detection. This chip will, he says, use an innovative antibody strategy to capture cancer cells from liquid biopsy samples such as blood. The novelty of Pappas’ work is that the antibody used to capture cells recognizes all cancer types, he says, and can be used to screen 16 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

Associate Professor Dimitri Pappas (right) instructs graduate student Ye Zhang (left). The pair developed a microchip to help detect sepsis.

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for any cancer cells that enter blood or other body fluid samples.

“Unlike other methods, our microchip does not require prior knowledge of the cancer cell type,” Pappas says.

That’s very different from the confounding challenges of conventional detection procedures that Pappas outlines. Just look at the hurdles:

q To detect cancer cells in blood, you must first have extensive knowledge of the cancer type you are looking for.

q Next, you have to physically isolate the cancer cells from normal cells, but current methods can’t always distinguish between the two.

q Then there’s the messy realm of antibodies. Methods that use antibodies to capture cancer cells often miss key groups of those very cancer cells. And did we mention that there is currently no single, specific antibody that recognizes a particular cancer type?

In this project, Pappas and his research team aim to isolate leukemia, lymphoma, and tumor-based cancer cells from blood samples. And their goal is to do that with the smallest possible number of cells—the idea being that the fewer cells detected in the sample, the earlier the cancer is being caught. Along the way, they’ll be determining the minimum number of cancer cells needed to detect each of these cancers in blood so that the cancer type would be revealed at the initial screen.

Pappas sees a future where doctors will use his inexpensive microchip test to cast a wide diagnostic net and, in perhaps as little as 20 minutes, learn not only if cancer is present but what type. It could be used for initial cancer screenings as well as for checking cancer patients for any residual disease. And while cancer is a serious condition for every patient who has it, Pappas believes the microchip may make a particular difference

as a monitor for relapse of childhood leukemia, when treatment timing is so critical.

“This grant is really going to allow us to develop this technology at a much faster rate,” Pappas says.

And this isn’t the first time that Pappas has turned to microchip technology to get answers to tough diagnostic questions.

Microchip Already Works for Sepsis Two years ago, he and graduate student Ye Zhang, invented a microfluidic chip that they believed would help detect sepsis, a life-threatening blood infection. Initial tests were conducted using stem cells, with encouraging results. So their team, including Dr. John Griswold, professor and chair emeritus in the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Department of Surgery, conducted a clinical study using actual human blood.

And it’s working. Two recently published papers from the study, one in the journal Analyst and one in Analytical Chemistry, report 98 percent accuracy in detecting sepsis with the chip. Sepsis is a potentially fatal condition in which the body’s immune system goes into overdrive trying to kill a blood-borne bacterial infection.

Although sepsis is easily treatable with antibiotics, it hasn’t always been easy to detect in the past. The conventional detection method—a bacterial culture to find the bacteria responsible for the infection—takes anywhere from two to 15 days. A person can die from sepsis in that time.

The chip pursues a different approach. Instead of looking for the bacteria causing sepsis, it looks for the activation of certain white blood cells, which indicate the body is trying to fight an infection. Using less than a drop of blood, the chip can detect sepsis in as little as four hours.

“Patient samples are usually where a project fails,” Pappas told reporter Glenys Young for a Texas Tech Today story dated July 9. “We were able to detect sepsis and in many cases track improvement in health using patient blood. It is extremely gratifying to see the idea work so well in a clinical study.”

Pappas expects to spend the next 1218 months analyzing all the data from the clinical study, which was funded by a grant from The CH Foundation.

“Ultimately, this type of work—for it to be successful—has to be commercialized,” he said. “It has to be out there in the hands of physicians. We want it to be adopted outside the walls of this building and outside the city of Lubbock.”

Toni Salama is Senior Editor in the College of Arts & Sciences. Glenys Young from the Texas Tech Office of Communications & Marketing contributed to this story.

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An Evening With

WRITTEN BY BLAYNE BEAL PHOTOGRAPHY BY IAN HALPERIN AND ARTIE LIMMER

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Emily Jones ‘98 and President George W. Bush

As alumni and friends gathered inside the beautiful Landmark Ballroom in the Hyatt Regency Dallas on a late April evening last year, there was that normal sense of excitement and festivity that always fills the air when Red Raiders gather together.

However, this night was even more special. A former president of the United States was joining the party.

George W. Bush, our nation’s 43rd President, was the special guest and keynote speaker for the fundraising event hosted by the College of Arts & Sciences as part of its capital campaign, Unmasking T H E C A M PA I G N F O R Innovation, that launched in the fall of 2016.

Normally such major speakers are reserved for commencement but Brent Lindquist, Dean of Arts & Sciences, knew that for such an event to be successful it was important for the College to make a big impression.

“When we began discussing this event we knew that it was critical that we find a notable speaker that would be a great draw for all of our alumni and donors,” said Lindquist. “Right from the beginning we had our focus on President Bush, and we are just very grateful that he agreed to join us.”

Lindquist, knows all about making big impressions as he initiated the first capital campaign in the history of the College, which dates all the way back to 1925. Unmasking Innovation: The Campaign for Arts & Sciences focuses on raising needed funds for student scholarships, faculty endowments, critical infrastructure, undergraduate research and the Dean’s Fund for Excellence.

Just days before the big event, Barbara Bush, the matriarch of the Bush family, passed away and the nation grieved the loss of one of our most beloved first ladies. Former Texas Tech Chancellor Robert Duncan, opened the evening by remembering Mrs. Bush as “a pillar of strength, a true champion of education and a dedicated public servant.” Her life and service to the nation was memorialized in a video presentation that preceded the Texas Tech University Choir’s stirring performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Through the power of vidARTS & SCIENCES eo, those in attendance were transported back to campus for the next several minutes where they learned about the incredible work being done by students and faculty.

Emily Jones, a 1998 Texas Tech alumna and the sideline reporter for the Texas Rangers, graciously hosted the hour-long question and answer session with President Bush. The pair covered a wide range of topics from higher education to the current situations in North Korea and Russia, and of course the tragic events of September 11.

“I’ve had the great fortune of hosting a lot of Texas Tech events, but I have to say this was the very best I have ever been a part of,” said Jones. “This was a fantastic night for Texas Tech and for the College of Arts & Sciences, and I was thrilled to be a part of it.”

Unmasking Innovation

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Blayne Beal is Director of Marketing & Communications for the College of Arts & Sciences.

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(Top Left) Members of the Texas Tech Air Force ROTC Detachment 820 Color Guard present the colors. (Top Right) Texas Tech President Lawrence Schovanec. (Bottom) Emily Jones hosts an interview with President George W. Bush.

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Chris Weiss and the Atmospheric Science Group in the Department of Geosciences have long been working to save lives by researching the deadly force of tornadoes. Their work in the Southeastern U.S. could be groundbreaking.

DEADLY FORCE WRITTEN BY TONI SALAMA PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY RODGERS Despite their destructive and deadly power, tornadoes are elusive things. They’re a strangely delicate convergence of elements seen and unseen. Scarcely formed, they writhe, wrestle against everything, even their own existence. Then, just like that, they’re gone. Some 1,300 of them swirl above the United States each year.

If anyone can get a handle on them, it’s atmospheric scientist Chris Weiss. Since joining the Department of Geosciences’ Atmospheric Science Group in 2004, the professor has been at the forefront of several major tornado research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—totaling $4 million thus far.

Between 2004 and 2018, tornadoes caused the deaths of 1,217 people in the United States. Weiss doesn’t like that one bit.

The goal of his research is to improve the accuracy of tornado predictions and increase warning times so people can get out of harm’s way.

That means Weiss has a lot of ground to cover, and a lot of sky. In addition to his teaching duties, his field work covers the better part of some 830,000 square miles of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee to collect observational measurements. Before every field trip, he and his colleagues invest months in collaboration, making phone calls, running numerical calculations, planning strategy. All so that when they get to where they’re going, they can deploy their instruments with the best likelihood of obtaining the most crucial data.

Killer Tornadoes of the Southeast It’s mid-December 2018, and Weiss has just driven 16 hours back from Alabama where he has been placing StickNets, the 7-foot-tall surveyor tripods equipped to measure wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, relative humidity and temperature. He finishes a phone call with another atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University and meets briefly in his office with a graduate student. In an hour or so, he’ll start grading finals, but for now he welcomes a pause to talk about his

field work, starting with America’s deadliest tornado outbreak in recent years.

“Typically the climatology says that the Southeast United States doesn’t have as many big tornadoes as what we have here in the Plains states,” Weiss begins. “But there’s a disproportionate loss of life for the tornadoes that do occur.”

In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, the tornadoes that struck in April 2011 took the lives of 311 people, almost 75 percent of the death toll of 419 caused by tornadoes in those states for the entire year, according to figures from NOAA. “After that event occurred, Congress a few years later decided that they were going to support this specific mission to look at tornadoes in the Southeast,” he says.

The mission is known as VORTEX-SE, short for Verification for the Origins of Rotations in Tornadoes Experiment— Southeast, and is funded by NOAA. “We are in our fourth year of VORTEX-SE. We were in the field in 2016 and 2017, March and April each year,” he says.

Then, rather than go out during spring 2018, NOAA decided to extend the observation period by deploying the StickNets in December 2018 and retrieve them by the end of April in 2019.

“It’s a broad climatology, and we know that tornadoes can occur anywhere from the late fall through the early spring.

A lot of tornadoes have occurred in December and January.

So we’re actually out there now, and instead of covering two months we’re out there for five months.”

With the 2011 deaths a still-recent memory, Alabama property owners welcome Weiss to their farmsteads, where he installs StickNets in a “mesonet,” a network whose scale generally covers an area larger than an individual storm, but smaller than an entire storm system.

“We’ve set up 24 of these StickNet stations, and I have 24 individual relationships with certain landowners out there who have graciously agreed to allow us to plant our instruments on their property,” he says. “And in some places it’s tough because if you’ve ever been to Central Alabama, especially, it’s really wooded out there.”

Trying to place the StickNets in what Weiss calls exposed locations—where there’s no interference from trees, hills or

Spring 2019 / 23

squall lines that sometimes develop wavy inflections rather than a solid line; it’s in those inflections that tornadoes tend to develop. And they’re harder to predict.

“So that’s one specific thing we’re trying to understand better are these quasilinear convective systems that produce a good chunk of the tornadoes that occur in the Southeast, and those often happen at night,” he says.

Weiss remembers a particular time when all the elements of a Southeast storm were working against him: “We were out there trying to run a project that was a lot like research we did in the Plains in 2016 and 2017, when we were actually tracking these storms and trying to plant instruments out in front of them. And we had some success with it. But these aspects that I’ve been talking about—I mean, there were tornado warnings, the sky was black, and I couldn’t see any storm structure because there was a big hill and lots of trees in the way.”

His experience mirrored that of many a Southeast resident: “You can’t depend on your senses to know there’s a problem or see what’s coming.”

Warning Fatigue

buildings—is more of a challenge that placing the same instruments in the Plains. “It’s not quite as easy as, say, Lubbock, where you can pretty much put it down on a street corner and be fine,” he says. “But everyone out there is really great, and they’re interested in what we’re doing.”

In this current VORTEX-SE study, the temperature measurements will provide, arguably, the most important data for what Weiss’s research team is trying to accomplish. Many theories on tornado development focus on the change in air temperature right near the storm, he says. “That’s something we’ve seen in a lot of numerical simulations and are really trying to get a handle on with real-time observations. We want to know whether these changes in air temperature actually do exist and whether we can discriminate tornadic and non-tornadic storms using that as a criterion.”

While meteorology plays an essential role in the deadliness of Southeast tornadoes, human factors also are at work. “There’s some basic science here in understanding how the tornadoes operate, but there’s the applied element.” Weiss says. “Once we learn, for example, the air temperature variation aspect, what we can do with that is to help improve our lead time on our warnings and especially reduce our false alarms on warnings.”

Weiss says that the average false alarm on a tornado warning is somewhere around 75 percent. “And if people constantly get those warnings and nothing happens, then this whole notion of warning fatigue comes up.” At some point, people just don’t heed the warnings anymore. “From the 2011 event, for instance, they had about six days of warning, from the first time that we thought there was a potential for an outbreak,” Weiss says, “and you still had over 300 people die. So, obviously, it’s not just all about the meteorology and the predictability of the event; it’s the communication with the public and assessing how people respond to that.”

Deadly by Night

VORTEX on the Plains

In addition to the visibility problems caused by trees and hills, the Southeast has other challenges that make its tornadoes deadlier than those on the Plains.

“Many of the tornadoes tend to happen at night, and that’s quite a bit different from what we typically see in the Plains.

We do have nocturnal tornadoes here, of course, but our climatology really peaks out in that late afternoon,” Weiss explains.

“There’s a disproportional amount of nocturnal tornadoes in the Southeast, and of course some people are unable to get those warnings. A lot of people don’t have weather radios, for instance, and some of the cities out there don’t even have sirens.”

In 2011, the Southeast experienced an unusual number of tornadoes that developed from supercells—storm formations more typical on the Plains, Weiss says. “But there’s a very specific type of storm in the Southeast called the quasilinear convective system, or QLCS.” Weiss describes these storms as big

Before VORTEX-SE, Weiss worked on VORTEX-2, a NOAA funded research grant that deployed in 2009 and 2010 (the original VORTEX project was in 1994-95) and covered the “tornado alley” states of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas, plus the plains of Nebraska and Wyoming. It was his first major grant project at Texas Tech and one that showcased Texas Tech’s tornado field research on the national stage. “NBC was out there.

The Weather Channel was out there following us,” he says. “So we’d have almost daily coverage of the work we were doing out in the field, which was good for all parties involved, I think.”

From that field work, Weiss has vivid memories of one particular tornado. “It came out of the rangelands of Wyoming, and it actually was very hard to observe because it was away from the paved road network by quite a distance,” he says of the 2009 event. “There were a number of cattle roads that were blocking our access to the storm.” Weiss took stock of the situation and decided conditions were too risky to pursue the tornado more

Chris Weiss, Ph.D., works on one of the StickNets that are used often by the Atmospheric Science teams at Texas Tech. These particular StickNets are being deployed in the Southeast as part of the VORTEX-SE project.

24 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

aggressively; and by the time the storm made it to their location, the tornado had dissipated. Weiss’s first priority is safety, and he steers his team away from unpaved surfaces if there’s any likelihood they could get trapped on muddy trails.

Studying the Supercells As Weiss takes stock of his research, he begins to talk about a different project that’s just now wrapping up—this one funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF)—called the National Robotics Initiative (NRI). He describes it as a large collaboration among Texas Tech, the University of Colorado and the University of Nebraska, and the first grant to truly address the potential utility of unmanned aircraft in the study of severe storms.

The three-year project is a lesson in preparation. The team didn’t go into the field—the vast expanse of the Plains—until spring 2018. Weiss says they obtained their best combined data set in South Dakota.

“The first two years were spent developing the concept of combined mobile radar, unmanned aircraft and surface thermodynamic measurements, integrating all three of those things together to get a holistic picture of what these severe storms look like both at the ground level and also aloft,” Weiss explains. “And then the third year, which was this past spring, we actually carried out a field exercise where we combined all those elements.”

Texas Tech operated the mobile Doppler radar; the University of Colorado contributed the unmanned aircraft; and the University of Nebraska took the surface thermodynamics— temperature, humidity, pressure and wind.

Right now, the team is analyzing the data obtained. But deMobile Ka-band Doppler radars, like the one pictured below, are critical tools as the Atmospheric Science teams chase storm systems across the country.

spite their best laid plans, the field work didn’t exactly go off without a hitch. “The aircraft in particular had some struggles trying to literally get off the ground. We had some launching problems,” Weiss says. “But we did have one really good case where we did integrate the three elements together in an effective manner.”

Next on the Horizon A new project just received funding from the NSF in summer 2018. Dubbed TORUS—short for Targeted Observation by Radars and Unmanned Aircraft Systems of Supercells—the study will deploy into the field in mid-May of 2019 and run for a month. Field work will concentrate in the Plains states and be conducted again over the same time period in 2020, yielding two months of data in total.

“Actually I just had a conference call on that yesterday to talk about all sorts of logistics. So we are in the planning stages for that project right now,” Weiss says. “And this project has a lot of the same players as NRI; the University of Colorado and the University of Nebraska are working on this project, too, and pretty much have the same roles.”

In addition, TORUS will include the research participation of scientists from the National Severe Storms Laboratory, who will bring instruments to the field as well. The project also will benefit from manned aircraft. “That’s one key addition over what we had in the NRI project,” Weiss says. “The manned aircraft will be flying about 5,000 feet up or so. That’s the P-3 aircraft, and that’s been used in a lot of research projects through the years. It has a radar on board so it can make measurements of the storm aloft.”

Using Radar High and Low There’s a tradeoff that takes place when using radar that Weiss describes this way: “The Texas Tech Ka-band radars at the ground are at a higher frequency, which allows us to get a more resolute depiction of the storm. The tradeoff is that we can’t see as far into the storm. So the aircraft balances that out nicely because it is the exact opposite. The aircraft can get a picture of the entirety of the storm—it can see farther into it—but the resolution is worse. So we marry those two concepts together to get that holistic picture of the storm’s structure.”

Weiss says that weather research radars are looking for very specific portions of the storm. “We’re looking for processes that are occurring that we think are relevant to the development of tornadoes,” he says. “So we’re out there with a game plan. We’re looking for very specific types of features.”

Given the elusive nature of storms in general and the formation of tornadoes in particular, it’s not always easy to deploy radar and other instruments at the optimum altitude, the optimum depth into the formation and at the optimum time.

“There are features that we often see in numerical simulations, but we don’t know if they actually exist in real life,” Weiss explains. “So a lot of the work that we do here at Texas Tech is to take the theory and idealized numerical simulations and then go out there and verify, confirm that these features are present in reality.”

Toni Salama is Senior Editor in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Spring 2019 / 25

REAL LIFE

SUPERHERO A&S Student Presents 3D-Printed Prosthetic Hand to Second Lubbock Area Child, Starts Nonprofit to Benefit More in the Future

WRITTEN BY GLENYS YOUNG PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY RODGERS

26 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

Spring 2019 / 27

SivaTeja Pati measures the hand of Malakai Johnson at the initial fitting in the fall of 2018.

Audrey Dominguez remembers the day her son came home, shortly after beginning his fifth-grade year at Smyer Elementary, and announced that his band teacher had assigned him the trombone.

She sighed, knowing that for 10-year-old Malakai Johnson, who was born without most of his right hand, any instrument was going to be nearly impossible to play.

While researching alternative instruments that might work for Malakai, she happened across an article about SivaTeja Pati, a Texas Tech University student who had 3D-printed a prosthetic hand for 8-year-old Toby Carrizales just a few months earlier. On a whim, she reached out to Pati.

“It was a long shot, but it was one I just had to take,” Dominguez said.

Five months later, Malakai has become the second child to receive one of Pati’s prosthetic creations. After spending the first decade of his life with only one hand, Malakai is looking forward to a future with two.

The Beginning

Malakai settles on "The Flash" as the design for his new prosthetic.

Audrey Dominguez, Malakai’s mom, reviews the design of the new prosthetic.

28 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

On April 10, 2008, Dominguez was an average, young, working mom. After getting her bachelor’s degree in education from Texas Tech several years earlier, she was teaching kindergarten and third grade in Hereford. She had two daughters, 5-year-old Meiah and 3-year-old Faith, and was expecting her third child any day. Her own birthday was in five days.

On April 11, 2008, though, her life changed forever with the birth of her only son, Malakai. Expecting a healthy baby like her daughters had been, Dominguez was distraught when doctors instead told her the boy had severe birth defects.

“When he was born, they said that he would never walk, talk or crawl,” she remembers. “They actually told us he would probably pass away in the first day or two.

“It was terrible. For the longest time, they didn’t actually know what was wrong with him. We chased specialists all over the States—every state you can imagine, we’ve been to.”

Eventually, Malakai was diagnosed with two incredibly rare conditions, Poland syndrome and Moebius syndrome, as well as Bell’s palsy and dextrocardia. What that means, functionally speaking, is that in addition to missing most of his right hand, Malakai is missing most of the right side of his body, his right arm is underdeveloped, he’s blind in his left eye and near-sighted in his right, he has substantial hearing loss and damage to six major nerves.

“All the conditions he has, he was born with,” Dominguez said. “The doctors tell us it was just a genetic fluke—a one-in-a-million thing. With Poland syndrome, most children are born with their left hand missing. With the way Malakai’s heart is, if it had been his left hand, he would have died at birth. It definitely could have been worse.”

Even counting their blessings, however, for Mal-

akai—a football and wrestling fan who Dominguez describes as “all boy, all the time”—it’s not an easy life.

“As far as health, seeing as how on his right side, he just has his ribs and his skin, he has to be careful to never get hit,” she explained. “If he were to play a contact sport or roughhouse, that could kill him. He does not have the casing around his heart like we would normally have, so we must continually monitor—at least once a year, for sure—to make sure everything’s good.

“As far as mobility, he doesn’t have a hand on that side so he doesn’t have the ability to do things normal kids would do: playing ball, riding a bike, picking up a pencil.”

‘Messenger of God’ It’s also not an easy life for Dominguez, a single mom to her now 15-, 13- and 10-year-olds who works two jobs: a full-time position at Hobby Lobby during the day and an overnight position at Dollar Tree.

“We are real big on faith; we believe in the power of prayer,” she said. “And I’m very, very blessed to have a job that’s very understanding, so that’s nice.”

She credits her church family at The Worship Center for keeping her sane because, she admits, she doesn’t have many other outlets for her feelings.

“I’m very lucky because I can go there, and I can be surrounded by people who genuinely care,” Dominguez said. “I have people who will call and check on me and make sure I’m OK. That’s it, really. I don’t have much time with everything else.

“Sleep’s not really in my calendar right now.”

Nor was it when Malakai was a baby. At just a year old, he died for the first time.

“Malakai has actually passed away a couple times,” Dominguez said. “He passed away when he was a year old, getting an MRI, and that’s when they discovered the nerve damage in his brain. Then, he passed away again a couple months later in my arms in the waiting room of his pediatrician.

“When he was little, his brain would forget to tell him to keep breathing, so what we found was that when he fell asleep, he would pass away, so he had to have surgery, of course.”

Dominguez said she named her son Malakai intending for his nickname to be “Kai”—which no one calls him, she laughed—but his health struggles have helped her see his name in a new light.

“It means ‘Messenger of God’ in the Bible,” she explained.

“Up until he was 8, he would tell us stories about angels or ghosts he could see.”

improvements rather than the uncertainty of his future, the latter fact is always there.

“We go to doctors all the time,” she said. “It’s constantly something new coming up with him; he’s been having seizures, and they can’t figure out what brings it on. It just seems like there’s always something new.

“Poland syndrome is very, very rare, and so is Moebius, and he’s got both of them. With Poland syndrome, they don’t actually know the outcome, so little things for normal people are big things for him. That keeps me busy.”

Because of Malakai’s struggles as a child, particularly in terms of his physical limitations, Dominguez began looking for options to help him live as normally as possible.

“I’ve been trying to get him a prosthetic since he was little, but a prosthetic for him, with the fingers he needs, is $100,000,” she said. “Insurance believes it’s a cosmetic procedure and there’s no need for it, so no matter how many times we tried to fight it, they wouldn’t do anything for us. I always just kind of folded with it because that’s the only choice we had.”

Dominguez even looked into prosthetics options through Shriners Hospitals for Children and Cook Children’s Hospital, but they could have made Malakai only a plastic hand, not a truly functional artificial limb. The waiting lists for those were years long.

“We were trying to get a robotic hand for him,” Dominguez said. “I think three times we’ve tried, and one time we actually thought we were going to be able to proceed with that, and then we got a rejection letter from insurance. So we fought it. We thought we were going to get it and then we were denied.

“Every time he gets denied, the letter comes back saying that his conditions aren’t permanent. I’m not proud of it, but I actually got into an argument with the lady at the insurance office about it. I told her, ‘If his hand grows back, you can keep the prosthetic.’”

Story continues on the next page ...

Prosthetics Dominguez said even considering all the issues Malakai has to deal with, she feels fortunate when she considers how much worse it could be.

“I’m a parent; I’m always going to struggle because I can’t help my kid,” she admitted. “But when I take him into physical therapy, and I go in and see these kids who are way worse than he is, I feel guilty. Why am I complaining? I don’t have room to be. I’m very, very blessed.”

While she tries to stay optimistic, focusing on Malakai’s Spring 2019 / 29

New Hand So when she spoke with Pati for the first time and he assured her he could create a specially designed 3D-printed hand for Malakai that would give him the functionality he’s never experienced, she was cautiously optimistic.

“I was a little nervous that it was not going to work out, just because we’d had our hopes up before and been let down,” she said. “But he’s so excited.”

After beginning the process in September, Dominguez and Malakai met with Pati in October for initial measurements and 3D scans in the University Library’s Makerspace. Malakai got to choose his design theme and colors, but when he announced he wanted a “Flash” hand, complete with lightning bolts, his mother was a little surprised.

“I would have thought he would have gone with maybe Captain America or Superman,” she said, “but the day we met Teja, he had a Flash hat on. I think Malakai was just so excited that Teja took an interest, and that had a lot to do with it.”

Of course, the red and gold colors Malakai chose for his Flash-themed hand also match another of his interests: the Kansas City Chiefs.

“He’s a big Patrick Mahomes fan,” Dominguez laughed, referring to one of Texas Tech’s most famous alumni. After only one season in the National Football League, Mahomes became the Chiefs’ starting quarterback for the 2018 season and ended up as both the Offensive Player of the Year and the NFL’s Most Valuable Player.

After scanning Malakai’s hand, Pati was able to print a 3D model of it. He then 3D printed the prosthetic finger segments— each taking 20 minutes to an hour—and the palm, which took several hours. Using fishing line, he fitted the segments together into fingers and attached the fingers to the palm, sculpting the prosthesis around the model hand so Malakai didn’t need to come in for fittings every time Pati made changes. After a few design alterations along the way, Pati presented his finalized creation to Malakai in late January.

Still getting used to the movement, Malakai curled his 30 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

hand toward his arm to contract the plastic fingers, his brow furrowed in concentration as he carefully picked up a ball, a toy airplane and even the model of his own hand.

“It means a lot to both of us,” Dominguez said with tears in her eyes. “Malakai’s perfect the way he is, but it’s nice to have a little bit of normalcy for him, to be able to do things like other kids do: play ball and pick things up and put his own clothes and shoes on.

“He loves sports, and he’s ready for basketball because now he can two-hand dribble.”

Whereas Toby’s hand was built as an academic research project so Pati could use the Library Makerspace for free, Malakai’s hand is part of a new collaboration between the Texas Tech Libraries, the Honors College, the College of Arts & Sciences and 3D Prints for Patients, the new nonprofit Pati has started to continue the work past his graduation.

“We want to be able to help children as they hit growth spurts, to provide a low-cost prosthetic so they can grow and have a device they can continuously use throughout their life,” he said.

The prosthetics are designed slightly larger than the child’s current size to allow for growing room, generally nine months to a year’s worth. Part of Pati’s goal is to be able to keep providing updated prosthetics to all his previous clients as they continue to grow.

“Toby is coming up on getting a new hand,” Pati said, “so we’ll see him again pretty soon.”

In some ways, Pati said, presenting Malakai’s hand reminded him of the same event with Toby eight months ago. But he’s quick to add that the moment with Malakai carved its own indelible place in Pati’s memory.

“It always gets you; the smile on his face put a smile on my face,” Pati said. “It’s amazing to see a child be able to pick something up with a hand he was unable to use previously. That moment will always make an impact on me.”

Glenys Young is a Media Relations Specialist in the Texas Tech University Office of Communications & Marketing.

UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES Four Arts & Sciences students with vastly different life journeys and perspectives share one thing in common.

A Determination to Succeed.

PROFILES BY TONI SALAMA, GLENYS YOUNG AND RANDY ROSETTA PHOTOGRAPHY BY BLAYNE BEAL AND ASHLEY RODGERS

Spring 2019 / 31

With over 11,000 students in the College of Arts & Sciences, there are countless stories of students that are achieving at the highest level, have overcome tremendous obstacles or are charting an innovative path for the future. Madeline Lockhart, Evan Akene, JohnMichael Martinez and Colin Baxter embody the Texas Tech spirit; and we hope you are as inspired by them as we are.

Madeline Lockhart

Double Major in Physics and Mathematics

BY GLENYS YOUNG

Madeline Lockhart, a sophomore pursuing a double major in physics and mathematics, is a 2018 Goldwater Scholar. She is the third from Texas Tech in three years to have landed the highly competitive award.

The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation was created to support students who are working toward careers in STEM fields, and the Goldwater Scholarship is the premier undergraduate award of its type in these fields. It pays for tuition, fees, books and room and board for winners. Among thousands of applications received from across the United States for 2018, only 211 were chosen.

“The Goldwater Scholarship is a very prestigious award that will help me financially, professionally and personally,” Lockhart says. In fact, “In addition to the financial support provided by Goldwater, “After I earn a Ph.D. in I hope this award will open nuclear physics, I want to doors in the pursuit of my fuwork internationally proture education and career.” moting the peaceful use of Lockhart says she has always nuclear energy.” loved math and science and plans to one day earn her doctorate in nuclear physics.

Then she wants to dedicate her career to researching nuclear safeguards and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. “ I am excited to receive this recognition and am hopeful that one day I will live up to the expectations of those who gave me this award,” she says.

“Most importantly, I am thankful to have been blessed with the amazing people and opportunities God has given me over the last 20 years.”

In congratulating Lockhart, Texas Tech president Lawrence Schovanec remarked that the award was a great personal distinction for her as a student, but that her success also elevates the reputation of Texas Tech “and is evidence that our undergraduates are increasingly competitive for major national awards.”

32 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

Evan Akene

BS Microbiology, Master’s Candidate TTUHSC

BY TONI SALAMA

Evan Akene (BS Microbiology with Honors, TTU 2018) is a College of Arts & Sciences student ambassador who decided to pursue his master’s in Healthcare Administration at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) before applying to med school.

The Nigerian-born student immigrated to the United States with his parents and four brothers when Akene was a boy of 12. His family first settled in Marietta, Ga., before relocating to Austin, Texas, which he now considers home.

When he began to look at colleges, he found that “there was something charming about a little big school,” he says of Texas Tech. “I also loved that the Health Sciences Center is right across the street.” The proximity meant that Akene would find “lots of opportunities to get involved early.”

Getting Involved In addition to his ambassador work for Arts & Sciences, Akene has volunteered at Lubbock’s UMC Southwest Cancer Center, where he assisted nurses in the infusion lab and restocked medical carts; he also helped distribute warm blankets and snacks to patients who often felt tired, cold or weak.

Akene now holds a Clinical Shadowing Internship that allows him to follow doctors on their rounds in the specialties that most interest him: primary care, family medicine, pediatrics, and internal medicine.

“I want to run a primary care practice in a rural area,” Akene says of his career goals. “Although they fascinate me, I’m not so drawn towards surgery or high specialization. What I want is long-term care to form a close relationship with my patients, to see the whole person, and conduct preventive medi-

Embracing Technology Akene is a telemedicine volunteer at the TTUHSC Department of Rural & Community Health, which actively serves Lubbock’s outlying communities. His project there involves fitting ambulances with telemedicine equipment, which enables specialists to virtually tend to a patient’s immediate emergency needs on the way to the hospital. It’s also his role to gather intel on how well the equipment works for the ambulance crew.

He uses this information to generate data analysis that will help further develop and refine the service. Akene believes that the future of health care lies in the integration of computer technology and medical advancements. With that in mind, he also works as a student supervisor within TTU’s Information Technology Division.

Believing that administrative knowledge and skills are essential to his future, Akene decided to get his master’s in Healthcare Administration before going to med school. The things he is learning in this program will, he says, inform his approach to creative problem-solving.

Making a New Life Akene knows opportunity when he sees it and feels a tremendous responsibility to succeed.

“I’m here by chance,” he says. “I can’t waste my opportunities.”

In Nigeria, Akene’s father, Richard, was a civil engineer who, just for fun, decided to take homemade passport photos of each family member. In those days, the United States held the

Finding the Time Seeing the immense sacrifices his parents made has fueled Akene’s determination to work hard and succeed. His older brother, Jephthah, already has graduated from Texas Tech with a degree in mechanical engineering. His younger brother, Jonathan, is working toward a bachelor’s in fine arts. His two remaining brothers, Joel and Joshua, are just starting middle and high school, respectively, and love sports.

Scholarships—and the generosity of those who donate to scholarships—are a big part of Akene’s success story.

As an Arts & Sciences undergraduate, Akene was a twotime recipient of the Landwer Biology Scholarship, a Pearson Family Scholarship and a College of Arts & Sciences Scholarship. He also was a member of the Honors College, and when he earned his BS in Microbiology in August 2018, it was with Honors from the Honors College.

“I’ve had to compromise Watch The Video on free time, forgetting about On Your Mobile Device school breaks that other students may take for granted,” he says. “But even with schoolwork, jobs and volunteer responsibilities, I often find some little quality time to hang out with friends, visit family, play basketball, or see movies.”

To watch the video associated with this QR code on an iPhone or iPad, simply use your camera app to scan the code.

cine wherever I can.”

He very much likes the idea of assisting at the birth of a child, then caring for that child’s health through adulthood and, hopefully, assisting at the birth of the next generation.

But if Akene has one foot in the world of compassionate rural care, his other foot is firmly planted in the world of high-tech.

Diversity Visa lottery in certain countries for foreign nationals who hoped to immigrate to America.

When Akene’s family won the Visa lottery, his father didn’t believe it was real and put the notice aside—until the next one came.

The process of waiting, interviewing at the embassy, getting immunizations, and obtaining travel documents took almost a year. Then, they packed up and were on their way to Marietta, Ga., to start life from scratch.

Akene says his father’s civil engineering degree and experience were not recognized in the U.S., so his dad “It’s pretty amazing when I took whatever jobs he could think about it. It was all by chance that we moved to get, from delivering newspathe United States and I feel pers to performing custodial like the opportunities I have work. On the side, he studied had can’t be wasted. When for a network engineering cerI see the sacrifices that were made by my parents tification. The family’s new and the opportunities that financial realities meant that have come from those sachis mother, Nina, went back to rifices, I just can’t sit back school to become first a Cerand do nothing with it.” tified Nursing Assistant, then a Licensed Vocational Nurse, so that she, too, could work— something she’d never had to do in Nigeria.

Later, Akene’s family moved to Austin, Texas, where they’d be closer to extended family already living there. Akene’s father was then able to travel between the U.S. and Nigeria to keep money coming in from his Nigerian-based civil engineering business.

Spring 2019 / 33

History Major

BY RANDY ROSETTA

Colin Baxter, a history senior with a political science minor, lost his sight to a brain tumor in October 2016. What the native of Alba, Texas, didn’t lose was his determination to complete his education and graduate from Texas Tech. Now back on campus, with guide dog Chase at his side, Baxter meets life with a healthy sense of humor and an upbeat, optimistic approach to the future.

Baxter was two months from his 21st birthday when he was diagnosed with a pineal brain tumor. Immediately, he underwent a 14-plus hour surgery to remove as much of the pingpong ball-sized mass as possible. But the tumor had damaged his optic nerve beyond repair.

As he recovered in the pediatric wing between two younger patients with brain tumors, Baxter found clarity in his own situation.

“I still had a chance to live, and a lot of those kids around me didn’t,” Baxter says. “One little girl next to me was crying because she wanted to live long enough to celebrate her quinceañera, but she died before she got to. That opens your eyes.”

He underwent radiation treatments and four rounds of chemotherapy before returning home to Alba and rehab in nearby Quitman. Next, he transferred to the Criss Cole Rehabilitation Center in Austin, where he spent three-and-a-half months learning the skills he would need in his new life.

Finally, he went to the New York City suburbs to learn how to manage a guide dog. He got on an airplane for the first time

34 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

in his life—joking that he intentionally requested a window seat for the trip—and returned with Chase, the 65-pound yellow Labrador retriever who, ironically, was born the same day Baxter woke up from surgery with his sight gone for good.

Baxter credits Texas Tech President Lawrence Schovanec, who visited him the hospital, with facilitating the return to campus. And a further incentive: Texas Tech Basketball Coach Chris Beard offered Baxter a spot as a volunteer manager with the basketball team.

As much as it can be after a sudden, profound change, Baxter’s life is back to nor“I told the doctor, ‘Yes, I mal—with some adjustments. will finish college because I Professors’ cooperation is vihave been working for this tal because he needs class lecfor too long.’ I already had my life planned out this far, tures on Word documents so so I wasn’t going to just he can transfer them to braille. give up.”

“It does take me longer to retain information because it’s more of a process with the way I have to access everything,” he says.

Watch The Video On Your Mobile Device

And when he thinks of his future, he takes it one day at a time.

“I don’t know how or what path I’m going to take,” he says.

“I’m really wide-open for any options because I have to be.”

To watch the video associated with this QR code on an iPhone or iPad, simply use your camera app to scan the code.

Colin Baxter

JohnMichael Martinez Kinesiology Major

BY TONI SALAMA

JohnMichael Martinez is a junior in the Department of Kinesiology & Sport Management who wants to be the first in his immediate family to graduate with a college degree—not just a degree, but one with a 4.0 GPA. And that is only the beginning of the goals this Abilene native has for himself.

Martinez hopes one day to be accepted into the medical school of his choice and embark on the long journey of becoming an orthopedic surgeon.

“Ideally, I’d like to get a fellowship in sport medicine so I can become a sport physician or surgeon for either a university or professional team,” he says.

Just a short time ago, Martinez’s ambitions were more modest. The former high-school athlete wanted to become an athletic trainer.

In April 2017 he landed his current job as a TTU Student Athletic Trainer. In this position, he works with Texas Tech Athletics, helping the players properly stretch their muscles, monitoring practice games for potential injuries, and going guide to help them identify various body systems. through rehab programs with injured athletes.

Martinez chose Texas Tech because of the numerous re It’s a job that still allows him to be on the playing field, he sources that the university provides for its students and for the says, but in a role where he is giving back by helping other ath- beauty of the campus, he says. letes in their performance—a great gig, for now. But in thinking “When I toured Texas Tech for the first time in the summer about his future, Martinez began to realize that he could aim going into my senior year of high school, I knew Texas Tech higher. was the place for me,” he says. “And Lubbock, to me, feels like “I always have been fascinated with the human body, the just a bigger Abilene.” physiology of the body during exercise and how the organ systems work during exercise,” Making Family Proud he says. By taking the med-school route, he Martinez says that, given his high-school ac“Ideally, I’d like to get a would be able to manage the healthcare of athcomplishments, his family has high expectafellowship in sport medletes in a more influential way. icine so I can become a tions for his college career. He’s the first in sport physician or surgeon his immediate family to attend university and for either a university or A World Class Scholar something of a role model for his younger professional team.”

At Abilene High School, Martinez was 24th in brother, Robert, who has followed him to Texas his graduating class of 500 students, placing Tech to pursue a pre-law education. him in the top percentile. The list of scholar Sacrifices just go with the territory. Martiships he has won since then includes the TTU Rusty Thomas nez’s newfound focus on a medical career has meant putting Scholarship, the TTU AT&T Scholars Scholarship, the LULAC some much-beloved activities on hold. An athlete himself, Marof Abilene Scholarship, and the TTU Athletic Training Schol- tinez now has, ironically, fewer opportunities to keep his own arship. His 4.0 GPA placed him on the President’s List for fall fitness regime.

2017 and spring 2018.

“I try to stay active, but sometimes it’s hard to find time to His favorite classes here have been those in anatomy, ex- exercise,” he says. When he does get a few moments, he lifts ercise physiology and applied exercise physiology—not only as weights. But that’s not all he’s missing out on. a student himself but also as a teacher’s assistant. Because he “I used to do volunteer work for Special Olympics here earned an A in anatomy and proved his mastery of the course in Lubbock,” he says. “I gave first aid and helped out with the materials, Martinez was cleared to work as an undergraduate bowling events, which were just for fun.” He also enjoyed workteacher’s assistant in anatomy. He wanted to help other stu- ing the Special Olympics basketball tournaments. dents do well in a course that has a reputation for being tough “Now” he says, “I’m focusing on my studies more than on freshmen. Throughout the 2018 spring semester, Martinez ever.” kept office hours for advising students, and he created a study

Spring 2019 / 35

VIDEOGAMES & ENGLISH COMPOSITION? A Look At Kendall Gerdes’ Innovative Teaching Techniques WRITTEN BY TONI SALAMA PHOTOGRAPHY BY ASHLEY RODGERS

36 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

Kendall Gerdes will be the first to tell you that her class can be a challenge: many new software programs to learn; surprising levels of record-keeping, evaluation and analysis; active participation not just with the professor but with all of the other students, who attend both in the physical classroom and online. There’s no grade until the end of the semester, and students have to argue for the grade they want.

All of this comes packaged in an English composition class where they play videogames.

“It’s a lot to get used to at first,” says Gerdes, an assistant professor of Technical Communication & Rhetoric who joined the Department of English in 2016. In the two years since then, she has become Texas Tech University’s choice to compete in the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program and has received the College of Arts & Sciences’ 2018 Teaching Innovation Award.

Her advanced writing-intensive course “ENGL 4360: Studies in Composition: Weird Videogames!” explores videogames as a topic for reflection and rhetoric. Her teaching style requires students to evaluate themselves as well as the subject matter.

ment on it, and I give the same kind of feedback as I’d give if I were slapping on a letter grade. But I don’t give a letter grade or a number grade,” she says. “I call it in my syllabus evaluated writing—the work that I’m giving feedback on.”

A midterm essay, with lots of commentary from the professor and a suggested letter grade, serves as a sort of practice run in preparation for the final. But the final essay receives the only grade for the course.

“The secret to the Learning Record is students are writing essays—once at the midterm and once at the final—pretty much the same assignment, in which they argue for the grade they think they’ve earned,” Gerdes says. “So I evaluate those. At the midterm, I’ll say, ‘You asked me for a B+. This is more like a C+.

Here’s what you need to do to improve before the end of the semester.’ ”

In the midterm and the final, students must show evidence for what they’ve learned in each of the course goals and then explain how that warrants the grade that they’re asking for.

The Method “The way that assignments and grading work in my class is a little unusual, but I’m a huge fan of this method, which is called the Learning Record,” says Gerdes, who also is director of the department’s Media Lab. “It’s a big part of my teaching philosophy.”

Course goals are fourfold: 1.) to understand the art of rhetoric, or persuasion, and analyze how a specific videogame makes arguments by way of its rules; 2.) to understand writing as a process by using varied composing strategies; 3.) to understand writing as invention, a way of exploring ideas, figuring out what to say, including the arguments of videogames; and 4.) achieving digital literacy through using the varied online tools of the course, including each student’s building of a video game using a software called Twine.

In Gerdes’ Weird Videogames class, she assigns no letter grades to students’ work throughout the semester. Rather, the total grade for the course comes from a final essay in which the student argues for the desired letter grade, based on evidence and rhetorical analysis of what was learned.

Students begin the course by taking stock of the knowledge and skills they bring into it and giving themselves a letter grade in each area. “This just tells me where they think they’re starting. And it also gets them used to grading themselves,” Gerdes explains.

Throughout the semester, they submit weekly journals about videogames played in light of class discussions, assigned reading, and coarse goals. Gerdes provides written feedback for the more intensive assignments: a videogame review, a videogame research paper, and an author’s statement of the videogame the student will create. These, Gerdes says, are like the main assignments found in any other rhetoric class. “I com-

“So they have criteria that they apply—I give them that— and they have the course goals. And then they have something called The Dimensions of Learning, which are basically the vocabulary that The Learning Record uses to talk about how people learn in different ways,” Gerdes explains.

For example, Creativity & Imagination is one Dimension of Learning. “Maybe you didn’t learn a whole lot about how to make games in a highly technical way, and you just sort of used the basic default format, but you did something really creative and took risks. Well, that’s a way that people learn, right?”

Gerdes says. “Not everybody needs to master all the technical skills, although Technical Skills is another Dimension of Learning.” Other dimensions include Prior & Emerging Experience, Content Knowledge, and Reflection.

The midterm and final essays also give Gerdes a strong picture of how students have experienced her class.

“The effort that students pour into their work doesn’t always show up as an A+ product, but maybe they did more work Spring 2019 / 37

than they’ve done in any of their other writing classes. So they can talk about that and maybe why didn’t the result come out the way they wanted,” she says. “I get to see all of that when I’m grading. It’s a great way to end the semester, too, with your students telling you how much they learned in your class.”

with that one,” Gerdes says. “It’s obviously something that you want to talk about very carefully in a classroom. But I also think it’s a time when students see how powerful games can be as a vehicle for teaching us about different kinds of life experiences.”

In class, students might play “Myst,” the classic fantasy-adventure puzzle launched in the 1990’s that changed home comThe Means puting. “You moved your computer from the office to the family In the Technical Communication & Rhetoric Program, digital room so that everybody could play Myst together,” Gerdes says. literacy is built into the degree plan. The Weird Videogames The class spends a week playing a collaborative game class delivers that though a variety of platforms. The course called “Don’t Starve.” Gerdes describes it as fast-paced and frenzied, where many things are happening all at once. “You’re is what Gerdes describes trying to keep your charas synchronous/hybrid, acter alive, keep him safe meaning that students in from monsters, keep him the physical classroom fed.” Before you know it, and students online all people are looking on one meet at the same time. another’s screens, ask “In our classrooms ing each other for items where we teach hybrid that will help keep their courses, we have a long character alive. “They just seminar table and a big start teaching each other screen, usually mounted how to play as they figure on the wall, and a poly-diit out one piece at a time. rectional microphone and That is really fun,” Gerdes camera,” Gerdes says. “So says. “And it lets us look we use Zoom video conat how video games are ferencing software so that social and ask, ‘What do everybody’s basically toyou get out of games as a gether.” team?’ ” Kendall Gerdes’ innovative teaching techiques are a hit in the classroom and

Everyone in the class thus earned her a Teaching Innovation Award from the College of Arts & The game playing uses Slack, a digital mesSciences in 2018. Gerdes (left) pictured above with Dean W. Brent Lindquist. culminates in the students saging platform, as the each designing their own de facto course website. videogame using an open-source software called Twine. “You “My students can log in. They can message each other. They can learn it in 20 minutes,” Gerdes says. can message me,” she explains. “There’s a channel just for chat, and there’s one for sharing links, and there’s one for me to send them reminders on assignments.” They use Dropbox for uploads and downloads.

Becoming proficient with those tools are part of the goals of the course. Then there are the videogames themselves.

“We start the class with a game called ‘Never Alone,’ which is a little indie studio game that was made by an Inuit culture,” Gerdes says. This videogame involves an Inuit girl, and the fox that joins her, in trying to save her village from a blizzard. The player can “control” both characters, who need each other to progress through the game. As each level is solved, an archival video of an aspect of Inuit culture, such as scrimshaw carving, appears. “They are showing you the history of artifacts you are playing with in the game. And who knew you could do that with a game?” she says.

Among the games on the play list is “Portal,” a spatial puzzle that allows the player to teleport from one enclosed virtual room to another by shooting openings—the portals—in not-always-logical spots around the chamber and with not-always-expected results. “Mountain” challenges what constitutes a videogame because the player, like the mountain, takes no action whatsoever. “Depression Quest” is an interactive fiction where players take on the role of a person suffering from depression, finding themselves with fewer and fewer choices as the character’s depression worsens. “Students really connect 38 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

The Meaning Each game in the course is chosen for its ability to shed light on reading assignments and for its potential to get the students asking, and answering, rhetorical questions such as: What arguments do videogames make through their structure of rules?

How do games make the player feel? In which ways do videogames help people learn? What counts as a game? Who are games for?

The class is made up of students who represent a range of gaming backgrounds, from those who have no experience at all to those who are avid gamers, Gerdes says.

“Because a lot of the games we play are not really mainstream games, everybody is getting something new,” she says.

“And I like having a mixed level of experience and even enthusiasm for games because everybody is coming to see video games differently at the same time.”

At its heart, though, this is not a course in videogames but in English composition. “Really, videogames are a vehicle for me to teach my students about rhetoric and about writing,” Gerdes says. “So I think having that mixed experience level is also a way for them to teach each other.”

Toni Salama is Senior Editor in the College of Arts & Sciences.

(L to R) TTU Chancellor Ted Mitchell, Andrew Littlefield, and TTU President Lawrence Schovanec/Photo by Artie Limmer

EXCELLENCE IN RESEARCH Dr. Andrew Littlefield is a 2018 Chancellor’s Council Distinguished Research Award recipient.

WRITTEN BY TONI SALAMA Clinical psychologist Dr. Andrew Littlefield conducts research that can make a difference in the lives of people who’ve developed suicidal behavior and substance use disorders. Littlefield is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences and co-director of the department’s Clinical Program.

Currently, Littlefield is working on a project funded through the Department of Defense that seeks to use advanced analytic methods to enhance the accuracy of predicting which individuals may engage in suicidal behaviors, such as making a suicide attempt.

“These efforts can ultimately help various agencies improve their current approaches to monitoring at-risk individuals,” Littlefield says, “and inform prevention efforts aimed at decreasing self-harm.”

Recently, Littlefield and his collaborators have examined potential new treatment mechanisms for individuals who already are receiving treatment for problems associated with substance use. The research group identified several factors that change across treatment, including decreases in impulsive decision-making.

In earlier work, Littlefield’s group identified changes in

several personality features, such as the tendency to experience negative moods, relative to changes in alcohol problems as individuals age from young to middle adulthood.

“By identifying these mechanisms, treatment providers can better understand what variables contribute to successful treatment outcomes,” Littlefield says, “compared to negative outcomes, such as relapse.”

Littlefield also has been involved in research that seeks to enhance the assessment of key psychological phenomenon.

This includes comparing biological assessments of a patient’s substance use to that of the patient’s reports of substance use.

“My work in this area suggests that, whenever possible, healthcare providers should seek multiple ways to confirm substance use beyond relying strictly on patient reports,” he says.

Other work conducted by Littlefield and his research team has helped determine which measures of important psychological features are appropriate for making comparisons across gender and ethnicity.

It is for this caliber of innovative work that Littlefield recently received Texas Tech University System’s 2019 Chancellor’s Council Distinguished Research Award and the 2018 College of Arts & Science’s Faculty Excellence in Research Award.

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ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

Celebrating the Class of 2018 “Politically and socially, we are living in a polarized world—in an America—that is arguably the most polarized it has been at any time since the Civil War. We can’t accept this. To some degree, the 140-character, cynical, sensational sound-bite and the narcissism of social media has corrupted our senses. We are losing our civility, our empathy and our humanity. But we have good news. Your generation has the ability to do something historic on behalf of civilization. To relight the torch of liberty and justice that has sustained so many through so much darkness. Your generation is smarter, more informed, more tolerant and through your connected relationships you are more mature and wiser than any generation before you. You have values, you are not afraid of diversity, you see the best and good in all people, and you look at the content of their character and not at the superficial labels meant to divide us. All of your eyes are wide open and you have the courage and power to wake up this great country and we are going to need you now more than ever.”

Jason Jenkins ‘97, Commencement Speaker, May 2018

40 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

Mathematics & Malaria Transmission MATHEMATICS & STATISTICS Angela Peace, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics, is on a research team working to improve scientific understanding of malaria transmission. The research project, entitled “Collaborative Research: Linking Pharmacokinetics to Epidemiological Models of Vector-Borne Diseases and Drug Resistance Prevention,” received a collective award estimated at $550,000, shared across researchers at five universities. The project involves developing mathematical tools that will understand how the behavior of drugs within the body, and their effects on pathogens, influence the spread of drug-re-

sistant disease. The popular use of antibiotics threatens their long-term efficacy, and drug resistance is recognized as a serious problem requiring urgent attention. Differential equations can describe mechanisms that drive changes in living systems; control theory can generate the best strategies to use these mechanisms to achieve a desired goal. These tools will help guide drug development and dosing protocols that balance the immediate benefits of administering antimicrobials with the long-term selection pressure imposed by these drugs.

History Student Leads SGA HISTORY Sean Lewis, a junior history major and political science minor from Virginia Beach, Va., is the 94th student body president of Texas Tech and no stranger to the world of student government. He served as his high school’s senior class president before coming to Texas Tech and serving on the Freshman Leadership Association, then as director of outreach and finally as chief of staff. Lewis was looking for a close-knit community for his college years and describes Texas Tech as a place where professors, staff, faculty and administrators all have a particular interest in each student as an individual. “I’m Sean Lewis. I’m not a number, and that’s something I didn’t see at other universities this size,” he says. During his presidency, Lewis is asking his team to focus

on student success and what that looks like in the classroom, for clubs and organizations, and for the mental health of TTU students. “I like to be proactive in seeking out problems to solve before they become an issue,” Lewis says. “I like trying to eliminate some of those barriers before people get really agitated about it so we can focus on what we do best: having an inclusive environment for students, and being a model for Southern hospitality at Texas Tech.”

Spring 2019 / 41

ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

New Ph.D. Program KINESIOLOGY & SPORT MANAGEMENT The Department of Kinesiology & Sport Management launched its new Ph.D. program in Exercise Physiology by welcoming its first three students: Ahalee Cathey, Stephen Fischer and Arun Maharaj. Cathey is working under professor Ty Palmer in the Ph.D. program and is a graduate part-time instructor for the Exercise Testing and Prescription labs. Maharaj is working as a Graduate Research Assistant under professor Arturo Figueroa, narrowing his research focus on the interactions of arterial function on strength training and supplementation (L-Citrulline) in aging, hypertensive, and type2 diabetic populations. Fischer also is studying under Figueroa, examining interventions to improve arterial function in postmenopausal women.

These interventions include supplementation (amino acids or antioxidants) as well as (or in combination with) resistance training.

The Ph.D. program in Exercise Physiology is unique for its focus on health disparities such as cardiovascular disease and obesity and aims to address preventable disease and associated chronic disparities by helping individuals of all ages optimize their health.

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Economics of Crime ECONOMICS Kaj Gittings, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, is a specialist in the economics of crime, and his recent research discovered a connection between mass transit labor strikes and urban crime. In “Urban Transport and Crime: Evidence from Unanticipated Mass Transit Strikes,” published July 14, 2018, Gittings and his collaborators examined the effects of mass transit strikes on criminal behavior in Los Angeles County between 2000 and 2007. They found that the strikes increased both violent crime and property crime. Specifically, in reporting districts affected by the strike, Gittings’ research showed that aggravated assaults rose by 18.7 percent of the mean, largely driven by an increase in domestic violence and an accompanying decrease in simple assault, reflecting an escalation of existing offenses. The findings also showed that aggregate property crimes increased by 5.7 percent of the mean. When Gittings refined the data to poorer versus wealthier neighborhoods, he found evidence for the existence of heterogeneous treatment effects. For instance, in lower income neighborhoods during the strike, the increase in both aggravated assaults (29.4 percent of the mean) and property crime (16.6 percent of the mean) was disproportionately larger. Bottom line: The research results suggest that poorer neighborhoods, which report higher usage rates of mass transit, become locally isolated for both criminals and victims, resulting in higher levels of crime.

Hurricane Team Deploys to N.C. GEOSCIENCES John Schroeder, a professor of Atmospheric Science in the Department of Geosciences, led TTU’s Hurricane Research Team to North Carolina, ahead of Hurricane Florence, to place 48 StickNets to measure the intensity of the storm once it made landfall.

“Basically, a StickNet is a small weather station that we can deploy very rapidly. It makes measurements of wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, temperature and barometric pressure,” Schroeder says. Schroeder’s StickNets took measurements at ground level while researchers from the University of Oklahoma took radar measurements slightly above the ground. The goal was to bring together data collected from both viewpoints to “better understand the structure of the wind vertically,” Schroeder says. Schroeder’s nine-member research team spread StickNets from Myrtle Beach to north of Wilmington, North Carolina, and retrieved them after the storm subsided. A year earlier, the team put 14 StickNets to the test on the Texas Gulf Coast during Hurricane Harvey. “The information we gather is used for research, but it’s also used by the weather service for forecasting. It’s used to understand what actually happened after the storm,” Schroeder says, “and sometimes that factors in on how we determine the damage that occurs. So it’s really important to make sure that the information we collect is accurate.”

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ARTS & SCIENCES

AROUND THE COLLEGE

Geosciences Students in the Field

Field Camp has been a long-standing tradition for students in the Geosciences program at Texas Tech. In fact, this annual excursion can be traced all the way back to 1927. In the summer of 2018, undergraduate students under the guidance of Aaron Yoshinobu, Ph.D., headed to CaĂąon City, Colo., for a few weeks of intensive study in the Rocky Mountains. In December, Dustin Sweet, Ph.D., led a group of graduate students to San Salvador, Bahamas to study modern carbonate environments.

Be sure to watch the two videos from the Bahamas and CaĂąon City.

You can scan the QR codes on your mobile device. iPhone users can use the camera application to scan the code.

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44 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

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Spring 2019 / 45

ARTS & SCIENCES

ALUMNI AND FRIENDS

The 2018 Distinguished Alumni & Faculty Excellence Awards Reception was held on May 10 in the West Stadium Club at Jones AT&T Stadium.

This year’s honorees included A. Wess Mitchell, Holly Hunt, David Trice and Charles R. Smith.

SAVE THE DATE 2019 Distinguished Alumni & Faculty Awards Reception May 2 | 5:30 p.m. | West Stadium Club More Info: artsandsciences.ttu.edu/events

2018 DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI HONOREES Holly Hunt

Custom Interior Designer BA, 1965, English Holly Hunt earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Texas Tech in 1965. Following her time at Tech, the West Texas native moved to Houston and began her career in the executive training program at Foley's. After working as a buyer, she set her sights on becoming a designer and made the move to New York in the early 1970s where she worked as a design assistant in a costume jewelry firm. Eventually she moved to Chicago and 46 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

founded her first showroom, Holly Hunt Ltd., which featured high-end interior furnishing collections sold exclusively to the interior design trade. By the 1990s she had begun opening showrooms from coast to coast, including New York, Miami and Los Angeles and was producing her own Holly Hunt collection of interior furnishings for residential interiors. Today, a total of 11 Holly Hunt showrooms extend throughout the United States and London. In 2016, she acquired the Vladimir Kagan Company from the iconic American furniture designer, enriching her showroom offerings. She has received numerous industry awards including the IIDA Titan Award in 2010, the National IIDA Leadership Award for Excellence in 2013 and a Lifetime Achievement Award for Design Excellence in 2015 from the Society of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago.

A. Wess Mitchell, Ph.D.

Assistant Secretary of State BA, 2001, History A. Wess Mitchell, Ph.D., earned a bachelor’s degree in History from Texas Tech in 2001, graduating Summa Cum Laude.

Mitchell went on to earn a master’s degree in German and European studies from Georgetown and a Ph.D. in Political Sciences from Otto Suhr Institut für Politikwissenschaft at Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany. During his time at Texas Tech, he was part of the Honors College and earned one of the first Honors Fellowships. He also received a Presidential Scholarship for an internship with United States Congressman Gary Combest. In 2005, he co-founded the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), a think-tank dedicated to the study of Central Europe.

Mitchell served CEPA as Director of Research from 2006-2009 and as President and CEO from 2009-2017. He also served on advisory boards for several U.S. and European institutes, including the Zbigniew Brzezinski Institute for Geostrategy, the Slovak Atlantic Commission, the Prague Center for Transatlantic Relations, Atlantic Initiative Berlin and the Alexander Hamilton Society. In October 2017, Mitchell took the oath of office as Assistant Secretary of State. As Assistant Secretary, he is responsible for diplomatic relations with 50 countries in Europe and Eurasia, and with NATO, the EU and the OSCE.

David W. Trice

Executive Vice President, EOG Resources BS, 1992, Geology David W. Trice earned a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Texas Tech in 1992. After Texas Tech, he went on to Texas Christian University and earned a master’s degree in Geology.

Trice began his professional career with Samson Resources and Sonat Exploration. In 1999, he joined EOG Resources, one of the largest independent crude oil and natural gas companies in the United States, as a Senior Geologist in Midland, Texas. From there, he began to rise through the ranks at EOG where he was named Manager, Division Exploration in 2005. In 2010, he was named Vice President and General Manager in Fort Worth. Since 2013, he has served EOG as Executive Vice President for Exploration and Production at the company’s corporate headquarters in Houston. He is responsible for the company’s operations in the Bakken, Powder River Basin, DJ Basin and Anadarko Basin assets as well as international operations. He shares responsibility for EOG’s company-wide exploration efforts leveraging his technical expertise in geology and extensive experience exploring horizontal, tight rock oil and gas.

Charles R. Smith

Executive Commissioner, Texas Health & Human Services BA, 1988, Psychology Charles R. Smith earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Texas Tech in 1988. Following graduation, he began his professional career as a child support officer with the Office of the Attorney General’s Child Support Division Lubbock office. He was quickly promoted to manager of the Midland office and then moved over to Abilene where he served from 1993-2000. In 2000, Smith was promoted to Assistant Regional Administrator for the Dallas/Fort Worth region of the Child Support Division and later named Regional Administrator for DFW. In October 2003, he was named assistant Deputy Director of Field Operations and just a few short months later, he became Deputy Director of Child Support and Director of Field Operations. In October 2013, then Attorney General Greg Abbott appointed Smith to serve as one of the executive deputies for the agency. Under his leadership, the CSD received its first Outstanding Child Support Enforcement Program award from the National Child Support Enforcement Association. In 2015, Texas Governor Greg Abbott selected Smith to serve as the Texas Health and Human Services Executive Commissioner. He oversees Texas’ Health and Human Services system, consisting of a $40 billion annual budget with nearly 50,000 employees, who serves 7.5 million Texans annually.

Distinguished Alumni honorees from the College of Arts & Sciences are recognized permanently on the Innovators Wall located just outside of Lecture Hall 104 in Holden Hall.

Previous Honorees (Year Recognized) Kathleen Campbell-Walker (2017) Lauro F. Cavazos (2016) Patrick “Pat” Green (2017) Holly Hunt (2018) O. Wayne Isom (2017) Phil Johnson (2016) Ginger Kerrick (2016) Nelda Laney (2017) A. Wess Mitchell (2018) Tibor Nagy (2016) Charles R. Smith (2018) David. W. Trice (2018)

Degree

History Zoology General Studies English Chemistry Mathematics Physics Speech History Political Science Psychology Geology

Spring 2019 / 47

Alumni Events Washington, D.C.

Watch The Video On Your Mobile Device

1

New York, NY

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2 48 / Texas Tech College of Arts & Sciences

Lubbock, TX

1. Washington, D.C., area alumni joined Dean Lindquist and the A&S development team for a scholarship reception at the Alpine Group on Dec. 18, 2018. (From L to R) Kent Bacus ‘03 and Barry Brown ‘89 2. Dean Lindquist hosted several alumni at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 20, 2018, for the Texas Tech-Duke basketball game. Afterward, the college held a reception for more than 600 Red Raider fans at Mustang Harry’s.

3. Jerry ‘66/69 and Susan Pittman ‘66 helped celebrate our 2018 Distinguished Alumni honorees at a reception on May 10, 2018, at Jones AT&T Stadium.

4.

The college hosted its 4th Annual Alumni Tailgate on Nov. 3, 2018, prior to the Tech-OU football game at Jones AT&T Stadium. Over 500 alumni and friends filled the North Lawn of Holden Hall for this incredible event. (From L to R) Heather Anderson-Herrmann ‘06, Maj. Mark Herrmann ‘06, Tayler Woodward and Jonathan Mayo ‘11 5. Alumni and friends of the college gathered at the Hyatt Regency Dallas on April 26, 2018, for Unmasking Innovation: An Evening with George W. Bush. (From L to R) Ann Macurak, President Bush, Jamie Zahirniak and Randall Macurak ‘72 Join Us At Our Next Event! artsandsciences.ttu.edu/events

3

Lubbock, TX

4

Dallas, TX

5 Spring 2019 / 49

From The Archives

TIME CAPSULE Former U.S. Representative Larry Combest is seen placing an item into a time capsule that was lowered into the ground beneath the College of Arts & Sciences Recognition Garden on Dec. 1, 1988. The capsule contains hundreds of items that were contributed by various members of the Texas Tech and Lubbock community. Among the items are letters from parents to children, a campus scrapbook

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and a vial of water. The time capsule also includes a proclamation from the Texas Tech Board of Regents and a signed copy of George H.W. Bush’s acceptance speech for the presidential nomination.

The capsule is scheduled to be opened in 2038 and items will be returned to their original owners or designated representatives.

HONOR A RED RAIDER Want to honor or remember a special Red Raider in your life?

Contribute to their College by purchasing a brick for $250 in the College of Arts & Sciences Recognition Garden.

To Make Your Purchase Contact

Cathey Durham | 806.834.4754 cathey.durham@ttu.edu

Office of the Dean Box 41034 | Lubbock, TX 79409 CHANGE SERVICE REQUESTED

“It means a lot to both of us. Malakai’s perfect the way he is, but it’s nice to have a little bit of normalcy for him, to be able to do things like other kids do: play ball and pick things up and put his own clothes and shoes on.”

- Audrey Dominguez, Malakai’s mom