University of Houston secures $1.6 million grant to advance STEM education for underserved high school students
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FRONT ROW (LEFT TO RIGHT): DR. JERROD HENDERSON, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING; DR. MARIAM MANUEL, CLINICAL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF NATURAL SCIENCE & MATHEMATICS; DR. DONNA STOKES, ASSOCIATE DEAN FOR UNDERGRADUATE AFFAIRS AND STUDENT SUCCESS, PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF NATURAL SCIENCE & MATHEMATICS
BACK ROW (LEFT TO RIGHT): DR. APRIL PETERS HAWKINS, PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF EDUCATION; DR. JACQUELINE EKEOBA, CLINICAL ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, COLLEGE OF NATURAL SCIENCE & MATHEMATICS; MARVIN PIERRE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, 8 MILLION STORIES
view moreCREDIT: JEFF LAUTENBERGER/UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON
Researchers at the University of Houston received a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for a community partnership to provide a culturally responsive STEM experience to underserved high school students enrolled in alternative schooling systems in the city of Houston.
The recently funded Racial Equity through Student Engagement and Teaching in STEM (RESET in STEM) program, an idea borne from UH’s successful STEM RISE program, aims to address the systemic barriers that hinder economically and socially disadvantaged students’ access to STEM education and create a more inclusive and equitable educational environment.
“These students aren’t just underserved, they’re underestimated,” said Mariam Manuel, clinical assistant professor in teachHOUSTON, a UH program dedicated to producing secondary STEM teachers. “Our goal is to empower minoritized students from historically marginalized backgrounds to thrive in STEM fields.”
According to Manuel, from 2017 to 2019, Black professionals made up just 9% of STEM workers in the U.S., lower than their 11% share of the overall U.S. workforce. The gap was even larger for Hispanic professionals, who made up only 8% of people working in STEM while they were 17% of the total workforce.
“This program is about instilling confidence, resilience and a sense of belonging in students,” Manuel said. “By giving them opportunities through mentorship and research lab experiences, we are paving the way for a more diverse and inclusive STEM workforce which will benefit society as a whole.”
RESET in STEM is a collaboration between the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, College of Education and Cullen College of Engineering as well as Eight Million Stories, Inc., a community-based non-profit that works with local school districts and community organizations and supports at-promise students in education completion, industry-based certifications and wraparound services.
“As an organization that prides itself on supporting and advancing Houston’s most marginalized student population, we are constantly looking for a stronger connection to college and career readiness,” said Marvin Pierre, executive director of Eight Million Stories. “This program will provide our students with a bridge to support through tutoring, research experiences and other key components that students need to unlock their potential.”
The program includes funds to provide scholarships to 40 undergraduate STEM majors and 40 high school students over the course of four years. Students from Houston area high schools including Jack Yates, Wheatley, Madison and Worthing high schools will participate in an on-campus, six-week summer program to engage in a STEM research lab experience. And during the school year, the students will attend workshops focused on college and career readiness.
“We will use a layered mentoring concept that goes beyond the summer STEM labs,” Manuel said. “They’ll get to meet regularly with UH undergraduate STEM student mentors who will help them prepare college essays and applications, meet with university counselors and get tutoring to help prepare them for core math and science content.”
UH undergraduate STEM majors completing the teachHOUSTON program will take the Research Methods in STEM course, which will be offered in conjunction with the immersive laboratory experience and a focus on anti-discriminating practices in informal STEM spaces.
“The undergraduate mentors will gain insight into doing contextualized science and math from a research perspective as well how to teach their future students to engage in the research process,” said Jacqueline Ekeoba, clinical assistant professor for teachHOUSTON. “It is imperative that our preservice teachers are confident in their STEM identities when facilitating opportunities that will encourage a sense of belonging within their own students.”
The grant will also fund student stipends, allowing them to participate in the program without interrupting their afterschool or summer jobs. It will also help cover transportation to and from campus.
“It’s a big commitment for the students and we want to make sure we’re giving them financial support as many of them would otherwise need to work over the summer,” Manuel said. “We are working to help dimmish the opportunity gap and dismantle barriers that keep students from being able to participate in STEM activities.”
Texas A&M-led team receives USDA grant to
study cattle respiratory disease prevention
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DR. MATTHEW SCOTT, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF MICROBIAL ECOLOGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE AT THE VETERINARY EDUCATION, RESEARCH, & OUTREACH PROGRAM AT THE TEXAS A&M SCHOOL OF VETERINARY MEDICINE & BIOMEDICAL SCIENCES.
view moreCREDIT: TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY
Researchers from the Veterinary Education, Research, & Outreach (VERO) program at the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences (VMBS) have received $300,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study the costliest disease in the cattle industry, bovine respiratory disease (BRD).
The grant will fund a highly collaborative project involving Mississippi State University, West Texas A&M University and Texas A&M AgriLife that looks at the effects of vaccination and management strategies on the cattle immune system and microflora, specifically as it relates to BRD.
BRD costs the cattle industry around $1 billion each year in prevention, management and treatment fees, as well as in herd losses. Though scientists have studied BRD for decades, the ability to accurately predict which individual animals will contract BRD remains elusive, making management strategies less effective.
Old Problems
For the last 50 to 60 years, BRD has been the No. 1 cause of disease and death in cattle feedlots of North America. It has a high morbidity rate, accounting for 35 to 50% of all diagnosed disease, which means that infected herds often experience significant losses.
Despite having been the focus of research for decades, BRD is difficult to prevent because there are many factors that can affect whether an individual animal contracts BRD.
“Age, proximity to other cattle with BRD, vaccination status and individual immune response are just some of the contributing factors,” said Dr. Matthew Scott, an assistant professor of microbial ecology and infectious disease at VERO.
The variety of factors can make it hard to predict exactly which animals will get sick and which ones will resist infection.
“Sometimes low-risk cattle still get sick,” Scott said. “Sometimes really high-risk cattle — the ones coming from multiple sources with no management or vaccines at all — don’t get sick. So, there’s a lot of incongruences at the individual level and we don’t really know why.”
Vaccines and management strategies, such as physically separating cattle that are vulnerable to BRD, are typically the most reliable way to keep cattle healthy.
“Those are the two main tactics we have in preventing BRD,” Scott said. “We can use these tactics to predict whether a herd is at high or low risk for BRD infection, which is information crucial to producers who may be buying or selling those animals.”
Separating out animals that have been deemed vulnerable to BRD can mean keeping them away from commercial sale barns, where hundreds or thousands of animals may be brought together, putting their immune systems in jeopardy and making it easier for BRD to spread.
“It’s the equivalent of having your kid start kindergarten,” Scott said. “All these kids go to school for the first time, and after the first week everyone has a runny nose. Cattle can be no different in that regard.”
Unfortunately, risk assessment only helps scientists predict general patterns of BRD transmission; it hasn’t been successful in predicting which individual cows will get sick.
New Strategies
The goal of the new NIFA-funded project is to try to understand what makes some cattle more susceptible to BRD than others. Scott and his team expect the project to take about two years.
“We have two main objectives,” Scott said. “First, we’re going to take samples from a variety of cattle and keep track of them throughout their entire life cycle. This way, we can know which cows eventually get sick and which ones don’t. Then, we can look at their gene expression and see what may be affecting their immune systems on the molecular level.
“Secondly, we’re going to look at samples taken from the upper respiratory tracts of these animals to analyze the microbial community — things like bacteria, viruses and fungi that may be present — so we can understand how they may be affecting the cattle’s internal ecosystem,” he said.
This stage of the project will also include examining what is called the host transcriptome, which is the measurement of all the messenger RNA in an animal at a given time. Having all that information allows researchers to see the expression and function of approximately 20,000 genes at one time.
Comparing the microbial community with the host transcriptome will give researchers an incredibly detailed picture of what’s going on inside cattle respiratory systems at the cellular and molecular level. Together with the life cycle data, Scott and his team will be able to see what factors impact susceptibility at both the macro and micro levels to an unprecedented degree.
To get the necessary data, Scott’s team will collaborate with several cattle facilities, including the AgriLife Beef Management Station in Bushland and Prairie Livestock in Mississippi, which is affiliated with Mississippi State University.
Scott’s team will also partner with West Texas A&M University for sample collection and data analysis.
Ongoing And Future Directions
Conveniently, the new project shares quite a bit of overlap with an ongoing VERO-led research project that is now in its third year, in collaboration with AgriLife, Mississippi State University, Kansas State University and West Texas A&M University. In fact, the new project will collect samples from the same groups of cattle as the ongoing one, which saves time for the researchers.
“The ongoing project takes a more traditional epidemiological approach,” Scott said. “We’re looking at how different management strategies and the use of vaccination influence rates of BRD in cattle using health markers in the blood. For example, how much does choosing not to move calves through a sale barn keep them safe from infection?”
The information from the combined projects goes toward assisting researchers in developing new and more effective strategies, including vaccines, for helping prevent, detect and treat BRD.
“Given how much the industry loses to BRD, the economic benefits of the research can’t be overstated,” Scott said.
On top again: UTA wins national award for noise control engineering
UTA students have won noise control engineering award four out of last five years
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UT ARLINGTON 2023 BERANEK AWARD WINNERS
view moreCREDIT: UT ARLINGTON
For the fourth time in five years, students at The University of Texas at Arlington have won a prestigious national award for noise control engineering.
Ross Everett and Bret Johnson, mechanical engineering students who graduated in May 2023, earned the Leo Beranek Student Medal for Excellence in the Study of Noise Control from the Institute of Noise Control Engineering of the USA for their work to decrease cabin noise in the autonomous rideshare cars owned by May Mobility that operate around UTA’s campus. The institute awards the medal annually to outstanding undergraduate and graduate students at North American colleges and universities that have courses for noise control engineering.
“We’re proud and happy to earn this award and to have been part of a team of people who made it possible,” Johnson said. “It really makes the hours feel worth it, and there’s a sense of accomplishment that comes from being recognized not just by our peers and the University, but also by people with no connection to us or our project.”
The duo and their senior design team—Nicholas McDonald, Amir Yonan, Fernando Alejandre and Grant Roney—worked with May Mobility to reduce loud noise from a computer fan mounted in the front passenger seat area of May Mobility’s vehicles, which created an unpleasant environment for riders. The team also published a paper, “Soundproofing Autonomous Vehicle Computers for Passenger Comfort,” in the Proceedings of the National Conference on Noise Control Engineering.
“We primarily focused on where the noise was coming from and applied soundproofing foams to surround the computer as necessary so that it wouldn’t overheat and the foam wasn’t visible,” Everett said. “We were very proud of our work, and seeing it come full circle was a really big honor.”
“I am glad to see the students were able to apply their knowledge and testing skills to solve a real-world problem and have a direct impact on the local community,” said Yawen Wang, an assistant professor of research and director of the Vibro-Acoustics and Sound Quality Research Laboratory at UTA. “Their work is important to the improvement of the autonomous driving experience and the further advancement of urban mobility. The award is a testament to their hard work and excellence in the study of noise control engineering.”
The Vibro-Acoustics and Sound Quality Research Laboratory develops integrated computational, experimental and analytical approaches to powertrain/structure dynamics, vibro-acoustics, active noise and vibration control, and data-driven techniques for condition monitoring and prognostics. Wang and his team work with companies such as Caterpillar, Daimler, Dana, Ford, General Motors, John Deere, Toyota, Oracle and many others.
Two of the previous three winners of the Leo Beranek Medal were graduate students. Ashish Dev Kotian, a master’s graduate in mechanical engineering, was honored in 2019 for his work designing, fabricating and testing a muffler for the University’s Formula SAE team, and Chia-Ching Lin, a doctoral student in aerospace engineering, was honored in 2020 for his research in hypoid gear noise and vibration control in automotive rear axle systems. Manya Singh, a senior undergraduate student in mechanical engineering, was honored in 2022 for her approach to decreasing cabin noise in the May Mobility cars.
- Written by Jeremy Agor, College of Engineering
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