Education (Colleges & Universities)
Here's a look at documents from public, private and community colleges in the U.S.
Featured Stories
University of Houston Researchers Driving Breakthroughs in Building Longer-Lasting, Faster-Charging Batteries
HOUSTON, Texas, Oct. 2 (TNSjou) -- The University of Houston issued the following news:
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University of Houston Researchers Driving Breakthroughs in Building Longer-Lasting, Faster-Charging Batteries
By J.J. Adams - 713-743-8960, jadams23@central.uh.edu
Researchers at the University of Houston, a global leader in energy research and innovation, are spearheading a study that could transform the future of battery technology.
Yan Yao, an award-winning professor at UH's Cullen College of Engineering, along with collaborators from Singapore, Zhejiang University and Seoul National University,
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HOUSTON, Texas, Oct. 2 (TNSjou) -- The University of Houston issued the following news:
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University of Houston Researchers Driving Breakthroughs in Building Longer-Lasting, Faster-Charging Batteries
By J.J. Adams - 713-743-8960, jadams23@central.uh.edu
Researchers at the University of Houston, a global leader in energy research and innovation, are spearheading a study that could transform the future of battery technology.
Yan Yao, an award-winning professor at UH's Cullen College of Engineering, along with collaborators from Singapore, Zhejiang University and Seoul National University,have published a review in the journal Science eying alternative metals for battery anodes.
If Yao and his fellow collaborators succeed, it could lead to longer-lasting batteries for electric vehicles, smartphones, laptops and more.
"I think the most exciting part of this is the global interest in this new battery," Yao said. "But we still have a lot of challenges ahead; there's still a lot of learning that needs to be done."
The review highlights the similarities and differences in monovalent metals such as lithium, sodium and potassium, and multivalent metals, including magnesium, calcium and aluminum.
The impetus for this review is that graphite, the standard anode for lithium-ion batteries, is reaching its practical limits. Lithium metal could be a strong alternative as it offers 10 times the charge storage capacity of graphite, but it tends to form tiny spikes called dendrites that can short-circuit batteries.
Meanwhile, multivalent metals present promising alternatives because they are more abundant, safer and potentially able to store more energy at a lower cost. The downside to these metals is multivalent ions move more slowly, which can slow charging, but are less prone to forming dendrites.
To overcome these barriers, researchers are exploring textured electrode surfaces that guide smooth metal growth and developing new electrolytes that optimize ion movement and protective film formation.
"This work underscores the need for continued research to overcome the technical barriers of multivalent metal batteries," Yao said. "Advances in electrode design, electrolyte chemistry, and battery architecture are crucial to harness the full potential of these materials."
The study also identifies emerging design principles, such as using locally high salt concentrations and weakly solvating electrolytes for monovalent systems, and strongly solvating, weakly ion-pairing electrolytes for multivalent systems, offering a roadmap for next-generation electrolyte development.
Other contributors include Yuanjian Li, Sonal Kumar, Gaoliang Yang and Zhi Wei Seh from the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) in Singapore; Jun Lu from Zhejiang University; and Kisuk Kang from Seoul National University.
With global demand for high-performance, sustainable batteries growing, this research provides critical guidance for scientists and engineers striving to develop the next generation of energy storage technologies.
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Original text here: https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2025/october/10012025-lithium-battery-breakthrough.php
UC-San Diego: Climate Questions Are Human Questions
LA JOLLA, California, Oct. 2 -- The University of California San Diego campus issued the following news:
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Climate Questions Are Human Questions
UC San Diego's Deepti Chatti puts people at the center of energy, environment and climate questions, from wildfire resilience in California to sustainable development in India
By Inga Kiderra - ikiderra@ucsd.edu and Melanie Poppel - mdpoppel@ucsd.edu
When people think about energy, they often picture power plants, grids and technology. That's part of it, of course. But for Deepti Chatti, the questions are also far more personal: "It's about whether
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LA JOLLA, California, Oct. 2 -- The University of California San Diego campus issued the following news:
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Climate Questions Are Human Questions
UC San Diego's Deepti Chatti puts people at the center of energy, environment and climate questions, from wildfire resilience in California to sustainable development in India
By Inga Kiderra - ikiderra@ucsd.edu and Melanie Poppel - mdpoppel@ucsd.edu
When people think about energy, they often picture power plants, grids and technology. That's part of it, of course. But for Deepti Chatti, the questions are also far more personal: "It's about whetheryour baby is warm at night, whether you have clean air to breathe, whether somebody has asthma, whether you're able to cook the food that you want to eat."
Her perspective comes from moving between disciplines. Trained first as an environmental engineer and later as a social scientist, she works at the intersection of environment and society. "Environmental questions are always also social questions," Chatti says. "They're always questions about people, too."
Now an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences and core faculty in the school's Critical Gender Studies program, Chatti studies clean energy transitions in the United States and India.
A 2025-26 recipient of the Hellman Fellowship, Chatti earned her PhD from Yale University and worked at Cal Poly Humboldt for four years, before joining UC San Diego in 2023. At UC San Diego, she designed one of the first courses approved for the Jane Teranes Climate Change Education Requirement.
A key feature of Chatti's work: She conducts grounded research in partnership with communities and colleagues from multiple disciplines. Whether facing wildfires, grid shutdowns, high levels of air pollution, uncertain access to cooking fuels - or other challenges - Chatti said she believes "in the value of understanding and bringing together multiple, sometimes diverging perspectives on the environment."
Fire, smoke and sovereignty
While at Humboldt, Chatti brought her interdisciplinary background to a partnership with her engineering colleagues at the Schatz Energy Research Center, the Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe to assess wildfire impacts and help design potential solutions to strengthen energy and air pollution infrastructure.
Access to electricity is often crucial during wildfires - for running air filters, addressing medical needs and staying informed on safety guidelines. But during wildfire season, electric grids may get shut down to mitigate the risk of fires starting and spreading.
The Karuk Tribe was all too familiar with coping with wildfires without the benefits of continuous and reliable electricity access. As a result, residents of ancestral Karuk territories were exposed to particularly high levels of air pollution during fires. To help design a better system, Chatti and her colleagues worked with Karuk communities to not only monitor air pollution during various fire events including wildfires and cultural burns, but also learn about their knowledge and perspectives on managing smoke and fires.
"We wanted to prioritize tribal sovereignty and knowledge, and create infrastructure that worked for their specific needs," Chatti said.
Chatti and her colleagues also partnered with another Humboldt County tribe, the Blue Lake Rancheria Tribe, who own and operate a microgrid. A microgrid is a small-scaled power grid that generates electricity for a localized area - like a university, hospital or military base. The Blue Lake Rancheria microgrid creates local jobs and gives the tribe control of their own electricity. It also served as an essential resource when the surrounding electric grid was shut down due to fire risk.
"They were able to provide a source of resiliency for the community, not just the tribe, but for the entire community in the county," Chatti explained. "Learning from the Blue Lake Rancheria's experiences with the microgrid helps showcase a way to approach climate resilience in the context of wildfires."
But that doesn't mean adding microgrids everywhere is necessarily the solution. "Process matters to building infrastructure," she said. So does understanding context and the place, its history and politics. "Just because something is a localized infrastructure does not necessarily mean it advances justice or is a more progressive way to do things. Localized infrastructure can be more just, or it can actually hinder that."
Cookstoves to coastlines
Chatti's expertise on sustainable energy and development reaches far beyond Humboldt County. With support from the Hellman Fellowship, she is finishing her first book, which analyzes clean cooking technologies, energy transitions and household air pollution in low-income homes in India, "centering the perspectives of women who are often the focus of household energy projects."
Here in San Diego, she and fellow faculty from Urban Studies and Planning are beginning to tackle water insecurity in the region. Funded by the Yankelovich Center for Social Science Research in collaboration with CatchingH2O, an organization led by engineer and water conservationist Brook Sarson, the project assesses localized water infrastructure solutions. It considers rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling in catchment areas in homes and neighborhoods in the San Diego region as potential tools for climate resiliency.
"Blending the social sciences with engineering is not easy, we don't even speak the same language!" Chatti said. "But in order to find just climate solutions, collaboration across disciplines is essential."
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Original text here: https://today.ucsd.edu/story/climate-questions-are-human-questions
Solar Rain Mystery Cracked by UH Researchers
MANOA, Hawaii, Oct. 2 (TNSjou) -- The University of Hawaii Manoa campus issued the following news release:
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VIDEO: Solar rain mystery cracked by UH researchers
It rains on the Sun, and thanks to researchers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), we finally know why.
Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in the Sun's corona, a region of super-hot plasma above its surface. This rain consists of cooler, denser blobs of plasma that fall back down after forming high in the coronae. For decades, scientists struggled to explain how this rain forms
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MANOA, Hawaii, Oct. 2 (TNSjou) -- The University of Hawaii Manoa campus issued the following news release:
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VIDEO: Solar rain mystery cracked by UH researchers
It rains on the Sun, and thanks to researchers at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), we finally know why.
Unlike water that falls from the sky on Earth, solar rain happens in the Sun's corona, a region of super-hot plasma above its surface. This rain consists of cooler, denser blobs of plasma that fall back down after forming high in the coronae. For decades, scientists struggled to explain how this rain formsso quickly during solar flares.
New explanation
That mystery was cracked by Luke Benavitz, a first-year graduate student at IfA, and IfA astronomer Jeffrey Reep. Their work, recently published in the Astrophysical Journal, adds a missing piece to decades of solar models.
"At present, models assume that the distribution of various elements in the corona is constant throughout space and time, which clearly isn't the case," said Benavitz. "It's exciting to see that when we allow elements like iron to change with time, the models finally match what we actually observe on the Sun. It makes the physics come alive in a way that feels real."
Why it matters
The new finding means solar scientists can better model how the Sun behaves during flares, insights that could one day help predict space weather that affects our daily lives.
Earlier models required heating over hours or days to explain coronal rain; however, solar flares can happen in just minutes. The IfA team's work shows that shifting elemental abundances can explain how rain can quickly form.
"This discovery matters because it helps us understand how the Sun really works," said Reep. "We can't directly see the heating process, so we use cooling as a proxy. But if our models haven't treated abundances properly, the cooling time has likely been overestimated. We might need to go back to the drawing board on coronal heating, so there's a lot of new and exciting work to be done."
Fresh insights
This research opens the door to a much wider range of questions. Scientists now know that elemental abundances in the Sun's atmosphere should change over time, which challenges long-standing models that assumed they were fixed. This means the discovery reaches far beyond coronal rain, pushing researchers to rethink how the Sun's outer layers behave and how energy moves through its atmosphere.
Link to video (details below): https://go.hawaii.edu/m2M
B-ROLL: (45 seconds)
Video courtesy: NASA
:00-:05 Sun
:06-:45 Rain on the Sun
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Original text here: http://www.uhm.hawaii.edu/news/article.php?aId=14162
N.C. State: Where Financial Advisors Grew Up Influences Their Business Ethics
RALEIGH, North Carolina, Oct. 2 (TNSjou) -- North Carolina State University issued the following news release:
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Where Financial Advisors Grew Up Influences Their Business Ethics
A new study finds that where financial advisors were raised plays a significant role in establishing their core code of ethics, which has a significant impact on their professional behavior as adults. Specifically, researchers found that where advisors grew up significantly predicted the likelihood that they engaged in professional misconduct as adults - regardless of whether they worked in the same area where they
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RALEIGH, North Carolina, Oct. 2 (TNSjou) -- North Carolina State University issued the following news release:
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Where Financial Advisors Grew Up Influences Their Business Ethics
A new study finds that where financial advisors were raised plays a significant role in establishing their core code of ethics, which has a significant impact on their professional behavior as adults. Specifically, researchers found that where advisors grew up significantly predicted the likelihood that they engaged in professional misconduct as adults - regardless of whether they worked in the same area where theywere raised.
"This study underscores that the environment we grow up in has a lasting impact on us as adults, and that efforts to promote ethical behavior in the financial advisor industry should take these cultural factors into consideration," says Jesse Ellis, co-author of a paper on the work. Ellis is the Alan T. Dickson Distinguished Professor of Finance in North Carolina State University's Poole College of Management.
"Previous research found one out of 13 financial advisors had committed at least one documented case of misconduct, and that advisors who committed misconduct generally stayed in the industry," Ellis says. "The financial advisor sector is particularly subject to misconduct because clients usually lack the expertise necessary to assess the value of the product or service they're getting. And that means advisors can engage in misconduct that allows them to make more money at the expense of their clients.
"Regulations aimed at limiting that misconduct can be difficult to enforce, which means that the primary protection against misconduct is each advisor's commitment to ethical conduct," Ellis says. "So, given the sector's vulnerability to misconduct, we wanted to learn more about what may be influencing these unethical behaviors."
For the study, researchers looked at data on 86,766 financial advisors, as well as data from 2,489 counties where those advisors grew up and 1,720 counties where those advisors worked as adults. The researchers also gathered information on each financial advisor's history of misconduct from publicly available data collected by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and state regulatory agencies.
To assess the impact an advisor's childhood environment may have had, the researchers made use of an index that was developed to measure "misbehavior." That index looks at data on six categories of misbehavior: financial misconduct by corporations, local political corruption, financial advisor misconduct, stock option backdating, spousal infidelity, and inappropriate financial relationships between doctors and drug companies. Each county was assigned a score - the higher the score, the higher the level of misbehavior.
"We found there was a strong relationship between where advisors grew up and the likelihood that an advisor engaged in misconduct," Ellis says. "Basically, the higher the misbehavior index score of an advisor's hometown, the more likely it was that the advisor engaged in misconduct. This held true regardless of whether advisors worked in the same region where they grew up, and it held true even when we accounted for a host of demographic variables.
"This does not mean that someone from an area with a high misbehavior score is definitely going to behave unethically," Ellis says. "However, it strongly suggests that the cultural norms where advisors grow up play a significant role in shaping their ethical foundations.
"We think the work we've done here drives home the extent to which ethical foundations are deeply ingrained in individuals, and that cursory ethical training efforts are insufficient to reduce misconduct," Ellis says. "We're optimistic these findings will lead policymakers and the business community to develop and implement more substantive efforts to influence advisor behavior in a meaningful way."
The paper, "Childhood Exposure to Misbehavior and the Culture of Financial Misconduct," is published in the Review of Financial Studies. The paper was co-authored by Chris Clifford and Will Gerken of the University of Kentucky.
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Note to Editors: The study abstract follows.
"Childhood Exposure to Misbehavior and the Culture of Financial Misconduct"
Authors: Jesse A. Ellis, North Carolina State University; Christopher P. Clifford and William C. Gerken, University of Kentucky
Published: Sept. 29, Review of Financial Studies
DOI: 10.1093/rfs/hhaf075
Abstract: This paper examines the impact of childhood cultural upbringing on financial advisor misconduct using novel data on advisors' childhood addresses. We find that an advisor's childhood location significantly predicts misconduct, with exposure to misbehavior culture during childhood playing a stronger role than exposure during adulthood. Addressing endogeneity concerns, we conduct several tests that support the notion that our results reflect cultural exposure rather than advisors' employment choices, location preferences, local conditions, family characteristics, or clientele characteristics. Our findings underscore the formative influence of culture in shaping financial advisors' personal ethics and could help us understand and prevent financial misconduct.
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Original text here: https://news.ncsu.edu/2025/10/hometown-business-ethics/
MSU Design Agency Bridges Gap Between Academia, Practice
STARKVILLE, Mississippi, Oct. 2 -- Mississippi State University issued the following news:
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MSU design agency bridges gap between academia, practice
A full-service, multidisciplinary design and visual communication studio operated by faculty, students and alumni at Mississippi State University is helping promote excellence in design while equipping students with real-world experience.
Housed within MSU's College of Architecture, Art and Design, VIS[LAB]--short for Visual Communication Collaborative Laboratory--was opened in 2023 thanks to the efforts of former Associate Professor and MSU
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STARKVILLE, Mississippi, Oct. 2 -- Mississippi State University issued the following news:
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MSU design agency bridges gap between academia, practice
A full-service, multidisciplinary design and visual communication studio operated by faculty, students and alumni at Mississippi State University is helping promote excellence in design while equipping students with real-world experience.
Housed within MSU's College of Architecture, Art and Design, VIS[LAB]--short for Visual Communication Collaborative Laboratory--was opened in 2023 thanks to the efforts of former Associate Professor and MSUalumna Claire Gipson and a significant grant from the Robert M. Hearin Foundation.
Associate Professor Tek Jung and Assistant Professor Aubrey Pohl serve as the creative directors and advisors for VIS[LAB]. Graphic design alumni are employed as art directors and help guide current students serving as paid graphic designers.
"VIS[LAB] is an active, real-time example of what you can do with a graphic design degree," Pohl said. "The classroom can be hypothetical. There's something very different about the mental approach to a personal class project versus 'This is a project for a client'--the addition of that real-world factor."
Both advisors said students are not just learning how to design but also how to manage a real timeline with deadlines and communicate with clients, all while being exposed to budgeting, project management and current industry practices.
"VIS[LAB] is a glimpse into the real-world of graphic design work and a great chance to strengthen classroom skills," said Ashlyn Triplett, a senior graphic design major from Aberdeen, Maryland, working in the studio. "It is also truly rewarding to see our contributions and ideas come to fruition on some of our major client work and even within our in-house studio experimental work."
Pohl said he hopes the students' work will bring in national and international recognition not only for the graphic design program and the studio but also for the university and the state.
"We are very interested in this idea of local impact, but local impact can go further and local impact can bring attention in from elsewhere," Pohl said. "We are showing what we can do here."
The studio plays a vital role in successful economic development, providing high-quality branding, advertising and conceptual design work to help local and state non-profits, small businesses and start-ups improve visibility for their clients and increase their success on all fronts.
"We want to work with people in Mississippi that are also working for Mississippi," Pohl said, adding that the studio will take on other clients. "Yes, we are a for-profit studio, but we are also first and foremost here to provide this experimental learning experience for our students and to support the community of Mississippi with design and visual communication."
VIS[LAB] offers an evolving variety of design products and services in alignment with the team's expertise and disciplines. For more information and to view recent work, visit https://caad-vislab.co.
Visit www.caad.msstate.edu to learn more about MSU's Department of Art.
MSU is Mississippi's leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.
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Original text here: https://www.msstate.edu/newsroom/article/2025/10/msu-design-agency-bridges-gap-between-academia-practice
Engineering the Future of Robotics at Texas A&M
COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Oct. 2 -- Texas A&M University issued the following news:
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Engineering the future of robotics at Texas A&M
Renowned roboticist Dr. Robert Ambrose has brought his technical expertise and dedication to building teams of character to be a force for good.
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Tucked away in the back of Texas A&M-RELLIS is a nondescript building that houses some of the most exciting and innovative robotics research at Texas A&M University. Everything from a Robonaut to a giant rolling RoboBall can be found in Dr. Robert Ambrose's Robotics and Automation Design (RAD) Lab. Because at Texas
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COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Oct. 2 -- Texas A&M University issued the following news:
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Engineering the future of robotics at Texas A&M
Renowned roboticist Dr. Robert Ambrose has brought his technical expertise and dedication to building teams of character to be a force for good.
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Tucked away in the back of Texas A&M-RELLIS is a nondescript building that houses some of the most exciting and innovative robotics research at Texas A&M University. Everything from a Robonaut to a giant rolling RoboBall can be found in Dr. Robert Ambrose's Robotics and Automation Design (RAD) Lab. Because at TexasA&M, the sky's literally the limit in what he and his students can design.
Before joining Texas A&M, Ambrose spent decades at NASA's Johnson Space Center. There, he was the chief of the Software, Robotics and Simulation Division, where he led the development of advanced robotic systems for space missions.
He retired from NASA in 2021, and later that same year, he joined Texas A&M. With him, he brought decades of experience in robotics, an impressive work portfolio and boundless enthusiasm for creating innovative prototypes.
"I've always enjoyed prototyping," Ambrose said. "Going back to when I was a kid, I was always designing and building things." At NASA, he led projects like the Robonaut, a humanoid robot designed to assist astronauts, as well as various rovers and exoskeletons.
"I really enjoyed prototyping new ideas, and the first branch that I led was kind of the technology branch that developed new prototypes. I was teaching the young engineers and old engineers just how to do prototyping, to think about a problem, try different ideas and to rapidly do that, where you weren't taking years to come up with a solution.
"I found A&M had a hunger for that and this idea of mixing research engineers and grad students together. And I knew a little bit about that and said, 'OK, I think this is going to be a good place for me.'"
And it has been a very good place for him. Today, he holds the J. Mike Walker '66 Department of Mechanical Engineering endowed chair and is a University Distinguished Professor. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has received several NASA medals for his work in advancing robotics.
Ambrose has continued his innovative research at Texas A&M, focusing on space robotics and autonomous systems. Some of his current projects include the RoboBall, a spherical mobile robot designed for missions in challenging environments like the moon or post-disaster areas on Earth.
But one of the things he's most excited about isn't the prototypes and research -- it's working with the young research engineers and graduate students eager to push the boundaries of what is possible in engineering and robotics.
Building a Better Robot
In 2022, Ambrose started the RAD Lab with five graduate students. Today, the lab has 31 staff members, including research engineers and graduate students. The lab's mission is to "design and deploy resilient robots tailored for harsh terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments, while fostering safe exploration and collaboration between humans and robots. We will cultivate the next generation of engineers, guiding them to usher in the next chapter of robotics."
The robots being designed in the lab aren't just there to look cool -- they serve real-world functions. There are projects like Marsupial, a robotic deployment system that can release smaller, specialized robots. The smaller robots can perform manipulation tasks, survey enemy territory, navigate smaller passageways and are interchangeable depending on the mission needs.
Another project, called Rover Rescue, is geared toward space applications, primarily for preventing rovers from getting stuck in difficult locations. With Rover Rescue, if this happens, another robot with a robotic arm can hook a tether on a winch and pull it out of its rut.
And these innovations are all happening at the RAD Lab. Much of the ideation and implementation is being conducted by young research engineers and graduate students under Ambrose's oversight.
"We have a bunch of teams led by a variety of students and full-time engineers working on various projects, including mobile robots, robotic manipulators and others," said Vidur Zimmerman, a research engineer in the RAD Lab. "We really have a good team here, where it's a mix of grad students and engineers. It's a one-to-one ratio, so we really have the opportunity here to collaborate and work toward those long-term goals and projects."
As he was building his team, Ambrose knew that character was as important as the skill sets the employees could bring to the table. "My dad used to tell me, 'You can coach everything except probably character.'" That stuck with Ambrose.
"I'm looking for character in the employees," he said. "We've only hired people that I think are really good people. And it turns out that's pretty easy at A&M. We have an amazing kind of person that comes to A&M. Finding people that can work with others and that like what they're doing and that are kind and good teammates, good citizens, those are the kinds of things that matter."
"It's a community of engineers who are trying to make this world a better place. I really love the culture we've fostered here at the RAD Lab. We have such a great community of people. I think something that I see here that's not really common in a lot of research labs is the extent of the collaboration. We're really all open to learning," Zimmerman said.
"I see this lab as a force for good because a lot of our projects are serving potential U.S. needs," Zimmerman added. "So, I think where we need to focus is on our terrestrial robot design that we hope to make extraterrestrial, because of our needs in space applications, military and in general."
Ambrose is also the associate director of the new Texas A&M Space Institute, which will serve as a testing ground for some of his lab's robots, like RoboBall and some of the rovers.
"The Marsscape and moonscape will allow us to test our rovers, or some of our other mobile robots, like our RoboBall. It'll be a great environment for us to test those mobile robots and other things, while we still do a lot of our prototyping here," Zimmerman said.
Immersive Learning Environment
Ambrose's lab is almost entirely run by students, which is by design. He was inspired by a biography of Neil Armstrong, reading about the astronaut's surprise at the age of the employees at Johnson Space Center. "He was shocked when he showed up. He expected a bunch of gray beards walking around. No, it was a very young team. No one else had ever done it before. And they figured out how to do it. It was a young team that took the first man to the moon. I will never forget that, just reading that in his biography. And so maybe we can keep doing that."
Ambrose said that young students today have opportunities once only reserved for mid-career employees. "They've got much more responsibility. They build stuff. They test stuff. They work together in teams. And they're doing things that professionals used to do more, like in the middle of their career, back when I was their age. And a lot of that is just the way we've built the team. But it's also a change in the field of robotics. So we're at an amazing moment in robotics where students today are doing things that used to not be possible except with large teams."
Stephen Hester, a mechanical engineering doctoral student, is working on projects in the RAD Lab that many engineers may not have the chance to work on until later in their careers. But under Ambrose, he's collaborating on highly complex projects. He says working with someone of Ambrose's caliber can be a little intimidating -- but extremely rewarding. Even when things go wrong.
"Any time a robot breaks or something doesn't work, it's a learning opportunity. And the way we approach problems in the lab is, 'OK, stop. What did we learn from this?' It's not, 'Oh, no, everything's wrong, everything's bad.' Pause. Think about this. What can we learn from this? What can we improve?"
Ambrose has built a collaborative community in the RAD Lab, one where grad students and undergraduates work with researchers and engineers, all working together toward a common goal: to create something amazing.
"All the stuff we do would not be possible without Dr. Ambrose. His passion and his leadership and his need to keep training new people are the things that I love about the lab. We're trying to never be stagnant and never only have the same group. We're always trying to bring in new people to work with and to learn from," Hester said.
"I think what really inspired me was his dedication to building really good engineers, like building people up, not just robots," said mechanical engineering doctoral student Sarah Lam. "So he told me his vision of how he wanted me to leave this program: 'I'm going to get you a job. I'm going to connect you with people. You're going to come out as a legit engineer.' So I think his vision for building people up and the care that he's put into finding my interest and finding projects that fit within my interest was something I thought was really inspiring and kind of attracted me to this lab," Lam said.
Inspiring the Next Generation
Every summer, Ambrose's lab hosts 30-40 undergraduates for the RAD Lab Summer Program. The 10-week internship program attracts students from all over the U.S.
"They spend the whole summer working with grad students and professional research engineers. And I've noticed a few things," Ambrose said. One of those is how the students react to seeing students not too much older than themselves, doing high-tech work in the lab. "They can picture themselves leading a team as a grad student. And it's changed their lives. It's changing their career trajectory. It's exposing them to this idea of prototyping and designing and building. And that approach of quickly designing and building is exactly what industry needs right now for creating new projects. You've got to be able to think fast and get a quick testable product that can be evaluated. And then you learn from it and rinse and repeat. That's what we're teaching here.
"The grad students are going to be world-class experts at it after they've been doing it for, you know, three or four years in grad school. They're already teaching me how to do it better."
- Amy Halbert '95, Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications
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Original text here: https://stories.tamu.edu/stories/engineering-the-future-of-robotics-at-texas-am/
Binghamton University: Project Adds to the History of One of the World's First HIV/AIDS Service Organizations
BINGHAMTON, New York, Oct. 2 -- Binghamton University issued the following news:
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Project adds to the history of one of the world's first HIV/AIDS service organizations
Students and researchers with the Human Sexualities Lab interviewed 120 people, assembled an archive and bridged a generational divide
By Jennifer Micale
Sometimes you discover history in a garage, stored in dusty boxes, or in memories that go unspoken for decades. Often, it falls to the next generation -- curious and respectful -- to do the necessary work of sifting, sorting and asking questions.
A groundbreaking project
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BINGHAMTON, New York, Oct. 2 -- Binghamton University issued the following news:
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Project adds to the history of one of the world's first HIV/AIDS service organizations
Students and researchers with the Human Sexualities Lab interviewed 120 people, assembled an archive and bridged a generational divide
By Jennifer Micale
Sometimes you discover history in a garage, stored in dusty boxes, or in memories that go unspoken for decades. Often, it falls to the next generation -- curious and respectful -- to do the necessary work of sifting, sorting and asking questions.
A groundbreaking projectspearheaded by Binghamton University's Human Sexualities Research Lab did more than add to the history of Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), the world's first major HIV/AIDS service organization. It also breached a generational divide and pioneered new ways to conduct oral history.
"It ended up being probably the most transformative experience of my professional and personal life so far," said Casey Adrian '22, MSW '24, the first author of two publications connected with the project. "As a queer person, it totally transformed the way I think about the community that I'm a part of."
Co-authored by Binghamton University Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Sean Massey, Western Carolina University Assistant Professor of History Julia Haager MA '15, PhD '22, and Weill Cornell Medicine Associate Professor of Social Work Sarah Young, "'You Folks Are the Ones That Are Going to Carry On': Conducting Cross-Generational Oral Histories About the HIV/AIDS Crisis" recently appeared in The Oral History Review. A second article, co-authored with Massey, Haager, Adrian and Eden Lowinger '23, MSW '25, is forthcoming in the American Journal of Public Health.
For the project, a team of mostly undergraduates -- led by Massey and Haager-- interviewed 120 former GMHC volunteers, gaining insight into the organization's work at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Formed in 1982 by five gay men in playwright Larry Kramer's New York City apartment, the organization provided care, advocacy and support to a community that was largely feared and shunned.
"The government wasn't doing anything, and health and social services weren't prepared to deal with this," said Massey, who volunteered with GMHC with his husband during the period. "People were being kicked out of their families and their apartments, disowned, fired from their jobs, and nobody was helping."
As the epidemic expanded, so did the diversity of people affected by it. Once seen as a disease that solely affected gay, white men -- the reality is far more complex -- HIV was increasingly impacting heterosexuals, women, people of color, children and people who use or have used intravenous drugs. GMHC adapted to the shifting realities, but not without tension or struggle, Massey said.
A key component of the organization's work was its buddy teams, which functioned as case managers, homecare attendants, advocates and confidants to individuals with HIV. Overall, the organization's volunteers weren't social workers or public health professionals, but queer people and their allies responding to an emerging crisis in their community, Adrian reflected.
"They did powerful, innovative and unprecedented things. They created materials that promoted sexual health, and were destigmatizing and celebrated queer identity," Adrian said. "They created cutting-edge systems of peer care and peer support. They engaged in policy change and legal support for people facing discrimination -- most of the time without a background in any sort of professional care or public health field."
The process
Massey and his husband stayed involved with GMHC for a decade, first as volunteers and then as employees, until their life and work took them away from the Big Apple. Around five years ago, they discovered boxes of GMHC documents and informational materials while clearing out their garage.
"I knew we couldn't throw that stuff away," Massey said.
He discovered that GMHC had donated their administrative files to the New York Public Library in the mid-90s and reached out. Perusing the GMHC archives sparked another idea: writing a history of those transformational years at the organization, which saw the expansion of its mission to a broader public.
A social psychologist, Massey reached out to the History Department for expertise. The department connected him with Haager, whose research focuses on 20th century public health and eugenics.
Reviewing the documents in the lab, Haager suggested interviewing the people named in them, if they were still available. Together, they laid the groundwork for the oral history project, drawing in undergraduate students from the Human Sexualities Lab.
The interviews, conducted on Zoom, took place during the pandemic, and subjects were sent the questions ahead of time. The number of interviews snowballed -- a dozen became 80, then 90 and eventually around 120. Typical oral history projects, on the other hand, involve maybe 40 interviews at most, said Haager, now an assistant professor of history at Western Carolina University.
"We broke rules that needed to be broken," Haager said.
A typical oral history project is conducted one-on-one, although a historian may interview a group of subjects at one time. In the GMHC project, the dynamic was reversed with a group of interviewers -- mostly undergraduates -- talking with a single subject. This worked surprisingly well, likely because of the intergenerational nature of the connection.
Behind the scenes, the senior researchers used Google Chat to guide the student team during the interviews, instilling confidence, remembered Young, a former faculty member in the Human Sexualities Lab.
"This was a unique model that people could learn from in terms of how to conduct these kinds of interviews, and also how to train emerging scholars," Young said.
Unlike traditional historians, the interview teams took time to process the emotional weight of what they heard, preserving their own well-being so they could be fully present for their subjects. Collaboration and self-care are strategies that historians may do well to adopt, Haager reflected.
"People were sharing things and saying to us over and over again: 'I haven't talked about this in 30 years. Thank you for giving me a place to talk about it,'" Haager recounted.
"They were great storytellers," Massey added. "The story wasn't just about loss, but about meaning: how they got through it, how important the work was and what they learned from it."
Students were also involved in compiling material history. It turns out that many of the interview subjects, like Massey, had boxes of GMHC material in their homes. Boxes soon lined the wall of Massey's office with meeting minutes, safer-sex pamphlets, training resources, newsletters, magazines, buttons, t-shirts and more.
Undergraduates central to both the oral history project and the cataloguing work include Adrian, Lowinger, Sarah Morea '22, Dan Pergel '23 and Claire Goldstein '24.
GMHC had donated their administrative files to the New York Public Library in the mid-90s; the library agreed to add these additional materials to their collection, along with the recorded video interviews with former GMHC staff and volunteers. The collection is now being catalogued and should be open to the public by the spring.
As a social worker with a background in community organizing, Young was struck by the solidarity shown by the gay community of that time.
"There's a metaphor of building a bike while riding it. It's a perfect metaphor for this project because these were people whose partners, friends, lovers and community members were dying a terrible death. In the face of that, how do we try to make lives better for people?" Young said. "The archive speaks to that."
The impact
A refrain emerged, repeated across each interview: working at GMHC was "the most important thing I ever did." Massey and Adrian are turning the project into a book, and that phrase is the working title.
"They were young when they did this work, in their 20s and 30s," Massey said. "They all left at different times for different reasons, but to a person, what they ended up doing in their lives was undeniably tied to this experience they had in their youth working for this organization.
Some went into social work or public health; others drew on their fundraising or graphic design experience at GMHC to pursue careers in those areas. Massey's own career trajectory and outlook were shaped by his experience there, he acknowledged.
Through the oral history project, GMHC is still shaping careers. The project gave Haager the opportunity to explore the ways in which she approaches her discipline, and she has since shifted her focus to digital public history, she said.
A Women, Gender and Sexuality major as an undergrad, Adrian's involvement in the project led him to complete his master's in social work. Today, he is the assistant director of the Program for Research on Youth Development and Engagement (PRYDE) at Cornell University's Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research.
"I want to be part of a generation that eliminates the HIV epidemic," he explained. "Hearing these stories shaped that desire. I feel very fortunate to be part of a generation of queer people who aren't living through this kind of crisis, and I want to honor the people who responded to this horrible health emergency by being part of the change."
The project also played an important role in bridging generational divides. Even LGBTQ students are unaware of the AIDS epidemic's history and its impact on the gay community, Massey said.
Older generations of queer people may see the younger generation as standoffish or uninterested in this history, while younger people may see the older generation as no longer relevant, Adrian reflected. This tension sometimes came up implicitly in the interview space; conversation helped dispel it.
"It's a lesson for my generation and future generations of queer people: How our community is able to stand up and say no when we're faced with oppression and health disparities," Adrian said. "How queer people can rally around each other and promote their own health and well-being."
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Jennifer Micale
Communications Manager
Division of Communications and Marketing
jmicale@binghamton.edu
607-777-6449
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Original text here: https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/5790/project-adds-to-the-history-of-one-of-the-worlds-first-hiv-aids-service-organizations
