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universities to celebrate a Nation of Makers (#NationOfMakers
on Twitter). "On Wednesday, June 18, President Obama will host the
first ever White House Maker Faire and meet with students, entrepreneurs and
everyday citizens who are using new tools and techniques to launch new
businesses, learn vital skills in science, technology, engineering, and math
(STEM), and fuel the renaissance in American manufacturing. The President
will also announce new steps the Administration and its partners are taking
to support the ability of more Americans, young and old, to have to access
to these tools and techniques and brings their ideas to life.
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School
of Nursing to Open Diabetes Education Center In partnership with Greensboro Urban Ministry, the School of Nursing at North Carolina A&T State University will hold an open house for the new Diabetes Education, Prevention, and Management Center. The event will be held Thursday, May 1 at 3 p.m. at 305 West Lee Street in Greensboro, N.C. The diabetes education center will provide community members with access to diabetes self-management and prevention education through one-on-one and group interactions facilitated by North Carolina A&T faculty and students. According to the American Diabetes Association, as many as one in three American adults will have diabetes in 2050 and an additional 79 million Americans are at high risk for developing type 2 diabetes. Since 2010, mortality rates for diabetes mellitus have increased in both Guilford County and North Carolina. In response to the community need, in 2013 Greensboro Urban Ministry agreed to provide a space for North Carolina A&T faculty and students to provide weekly diabetes support through education and outreach. “It is an opportunity to serve the citizens of Greensboro and to move our community engagement forward,” said Inez Tuck, Dean of the School of Nursing. |
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National
Nuclear Security Administration Awards $25 Million Grant to Consortium Alum news The National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation Research and Development announced an award of a $25 million grant to a North Carolina State University-led consortium that includes North Carolina A&T State University, for research and development in enabling capabilities for nonproliferation (CNEC). This sizeable, long-term investment will support the consortium at $5 million per year for five years. The grant is in response to a funding opportunity announcement issued in May 2013. The CNEC consortium proposal won over 22 other proposals. Dr. Abdellah Ahmidouch, chair of the department of physics at North Carolina A&T, nuclear physics professor is the NC A&T project principal investigator. He stated: “The proposal is of research nature and includes an educational component in the field of nuclear science and nuclear non-proliferation. It will offer a great opportunity for our students to work with world-class researchers and introduce them to career opportunities at national labs. This grant will greatly enhance the Department’s research and educational capabilities in the field nuclear science.” This grant will provide the U.S. government with cutting edge research and development to identify and address multi-disciplinary and cross-functional technology and research needs that are critical to detecting foreign nuclear weapon proliferation activities. Specifically, the research projects pursued by the consortium will include technologies to enhance simulation capabilities, algorithms, and modeling; new test and evaluation models for detection sensors; new remote sensing capabilities; and applications of data analytics and data fusion to better characterize and detect special nuclear materials. In addition to North Carolina A&T, the consortium includes the University of Michigan, Purdue, the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, Kansas State, Georgia Tech as well as three national laboratories, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Pacific Northwest. |
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Nuclear
Industry Engineer Boasts Three-Decades-Long Career By: Courtney J. Jackson Allison Jones-Young stands at the helm of an impressive 30-year career in the nuclear industry. As she celebrates a milestone of service in her field, Young has picked up an extensive list of life lessons and successes. Young has worked for Duke Energy for three decades holding various positions at the McQuire, Catawba and Oconee Nuclear sites. She now serves as lead engineer in nuclear development, where her job is to monitor the site according to regulations set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In the rigorous field of nuclear engineering, Young shared that she is regularly exposed to highly secure and, at times, highly stressful environments—which makes the length of her career even more notable. “You are trained on where you need to go, how long you stay and the consequences if you stay too long,” she said. But safety concerns aside, the significant lesson that propelled her career came when she discovered the value of the education she received from North Carolina A&T State University. “I learned that one pretty early on, she said.” Undeterred by others, her strategy for building a sustainable career in the nuclear industry was to infuse the confidence she gained from her alma mater into every fragment of her work. “You have to say, I am going to do what I know and what I’ve been trained to do,” Young affirmed. Before graduating in 1981 with a degree in mechanical engineering, she was a typical college student who used the power of perseverance to her advantage she recalled. She learned about North Carolina A&T from a high-school guidance counselor and experienced her first taste of Aggieland during a pre-engineering summer program. Although she was unsure about attending A&T or majoring in engineering at first, Young fought to earn her spot in the demanding program by attending summer classes to meet the school’s enrollment requirements. Young went on to earn a master’s degree in business administration from Queens College and is a member of the Business Women’s Network. In her spare time she mentors girls in engineering through presentations and school visits in the Charlotte Mecklenburg County area. With retirement on the horizon Young, anticipates spending more time volunteering in the school system. “It really does not matter where you start,” she said. “I am from one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. People think that if you are from a poor area you cannot learn, progress or succeed. I am a prime example of why that logic is flawed,” she explained. |
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A&T Gets Approval for MBA Program
Samantha Hargrove GREENSBORO, N.C.-North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University recently received approval from the University of North Carolina General Administration to change the name of its Master of Science in Management Program (MSM) to the Master of Business Administration (MBA). The change will become effective in the fall semester 2014. This change is significant because MBA programs are the signature graduate programs for business schools. The renaming will enhance the visibility of graduate programming in the School of Business and Economics at North Carolina A&T State University. The MBA program will continue to offer prospective students opportunities to focus on concentrations in accounting, human resources management, and supply chain systems. In the near future, the MBA will also offer more interdisciplinary opportunities to individuals with STEM backgrounds. “This is an excellent opportunity for North Carolina A&T to showcase its wealth of knowledge and expertise. This MBA program will prepare more qualified and highly marketable employees who understand the business process,” said Joe B. Whitehead Jr., provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at North Carolina A&T State University. According to the North Carolina Department of Commerce - Labor and Economic Analysis Division report, employment in professional and business services will experience the highest growth rate of all sectors between 2010 and 2020. The university’s goal is to build a highly competitive MBA program with core courses that continue to provide traditional business and management concepts that are very responsive to current workforce needs. “Our goal is to create an MBA graduate who is adept in a specific area of concentration but who can also apply interdisciplinary knowledge within a management system,” added Whitehead. |
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Electrical Engineering Professor Wins
North Carolina Space Grant New Investigator Award Samantha Hargrove GREENSBORO, N.C.- Dr. Fatemeh Afghah, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering won the NC Space New Investigator Award for her research in Inter-Satellite Communications in Autonomous Small Satellite Networks. The New Investigators Program is designed to strengthen North Carolina's aerospace-related research infrastructure by providing startup funding to early career university faculty who are conducting research that is directly aligned with NASA's Strategic Framework. Afghah is the director of Wireless Networking (WiNet) Laboratory in the ECE department. Her research focuses on wireless communications, dynamic spectrum sharing, game theory optimization and biomedical data analysis. She is a recipient of several awards such as International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Granted Fellowship, N2Women Fellowship, Maine Economic Improvement Doctoral Fellowship (MEIF), and Graduate Student Government Research Grant. She is the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) youth forum alumni. Afghah received her Bachelor’s and Master’s of Science from Khajeh Nassir Toosi University of Technology in 2005 and 2008; and her doctorate from the University of Maine in 2013. |
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A&T
Ranks No.4 for Online Graduate Computer Systems Program for Veterans
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s online graduate computer information technology program has been ranked among the top online degree programs for veterans the U.S. News & World Report. The U.S. News & World Report 2014 Best Online Programs for Veterans ranking, released on Tuesday, May 20, includes schools that were first numerically ranked in the U.S. News & World Report’s 2014 Best Online Programs ranking. Additional factors that were considered in the ranking of the program include veterans-focused initiatives. “I am extremely excited to see the hard work and strategic planning that is taking place on our campus being nationally recognized,” said Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. “We are committed to producing excellence and will stay focused on preeminence.” The university’s distance learning computer systems program ranked at No. 4 on the best computer information technology programs list and was ranked as the No. 15 best online graduate programs in U.S. News & World Report’s 2015 best online graduate programs list. To be ranked, an online degree program had to report participation in four key programs that offer educational benefits to people with military service. The rankings methodology requires programs to belong to institutions that are certified for the GI Bill; they must also belong to schools participating in the Yellow Ribbon Program or public institutions that charge in-state tuition for all out-of-state veterans. The Best Online Programs for Veterans are also affiliated with schools that are members of the Service members Opportunity Colleges (SOC) Consortium and offer at least once course in the Defense Activity for Non-Traditional Education Support (DANTES) catalog. |
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Professor’s
New Discovery in COPD Wins Prestigious Support Dr. Jenora Waterman has made one key discovery toward improving the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among agricultural workers, and now she’s been accepted into a prestigious career development program to advance her research. Waterman is an assistant professor of functional genomics in the Department of Animal Sciences at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. COPD is a major cause of death in the United States, most typically found among smokers. A less studied aspect of the disease is the 7% of its U.S. victims who are agricultural workers. They can develop COPD as a result of long-term exposure to animal production facilities containing dust that contributes to respiratory diseases. High-density swine production houses are one example of such facilities. Waterman’s first key finding came from comparing pigs raised indoors with those raised outdoors. Pigs aren’t as severely affected by the dust as humans are, but her work demonstrated that their respiratory systems are uniquely adapted to their housing type. “My lab recently showed for the first time that pigs reared indoors and those raised outdoors exhibit structural and cellular differences in their respiratory systems,” Waterman said. “The next step will be studying those differences to identify potential biomarkers that could serve as diagnostic or prognostic markers of agriculture-related COPD in humans.” Waterman will take that step as an NC TraCS K-Scholar, a professional development honor for junior faculty members funded through the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program of the National Institutes of Health. She will receive funding for her research and mentored training for three years. Two faculty members from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will serve as mentors, Dr. Claire Doerschuk, a medical doctor and pathologist, and Dr. Lee Graves, a pharmacologist. The scholars program is designed to train younger investigators in a dramatically new approach to research. It’s based on interdisciplinary teamwork, because the traditional single-discipline focus isn’t well suited to attacking complex biomedical problems or to putting new discoveries into practice as quickly as possible. And it’s translational – work that seeks to improve the health of the population by transforming discoveries from laboratory into clinical practice in community and health policy. N.C. A&T is a partner in the CTSA grant won by UNC-CH last fall. Dr. Waterman’s grant is funded through the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences (NC TraCS) Institute, the integrated home of the CTSA program at UNC-CH. The goal of NC TraCS is to accelerate the translation of clinical research results into the treatment of disease. Waterman is the director of the Respiratory Biology and Toxicology Laboratory at North Carolina A&T State University. Her interests include respiratory cell biology, environmental toxicology, and cellular pathology. Her research focuses on the extent of environmental and functional genomic/proteomic influences on the pathophysiology of agriculture-related respiratory diseases. She is an affiliated faculty member of the North Carolina A&T bioengineering program and a contributing faculty member of the doctoral program in energy and environmental systems. Dr. Waterman was named the School of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences Outstanding Junior Researcher this year and research Rookie of the Year in 2011. She serves as a member of the A&T Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee and the Institutional Biosafety Committee. Dr. Waterman received a master’s in biology from N.C. A&T and a Ph.D. in functional genomics is from N.C. State University. |
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