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Enhancing Minority Engineering Education at AAMU through DoE Sponsored Project

Abstract

This paper describes our experience in enhancing minority engineering education at Alabama A&M University through a DOE Sponsored project. Strategies, activities and outcome were discussed in the following area: (1) Establishment and enhancement of high performance computing laboratory at AAMU; (2) Training of minority graduate and undergraduate students in computational science and engineering; (3) DOE Computational Science scholarship program at AAMU; and (4) Minority undergraduate summer research interns at the computational science division of Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL). Outcome assessment was discussed.

Introduction

According to the US 1990 census, the total US population was 248,709,873 in 1990. Of these, approximately 51% were women, 29,986,060 (or 12%) were African American, 22,354,059 (or 9%) Hispanic, and 1,878,285 (or 1%) Native American. In 1995, of the total 132 million U.S. civilian labor forces, only 5500 African American who had Ph.D. degree in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (SMET) were employed in the SMET field. Only 5.6% of the enrollment in SMET of graduate schools were African American, Hispanic American and Native American (AAHANA) students. There is an urgent need to train minority students in SMET field [1]. Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are the primary source of African-American scientists in the US, and HBCU participation in training of students in SMET field is critical.

To respond to these critical needs, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Mathematics, Information and Computational Sciences (MICS) division created an Alliance for Computational Science Collaboration in 1997. Strategies designed to help produce future DOE minority scientists and engineers are: (1). To involve HBCU students and faculty members in computational science projects at national laboratories and research institutions; (2). To assist HBCU faculty members in integrating interdisciplinary computational science courses into their undergraduate curricula, involving freshmen to senior students; and (3). To provide support and expertise to HBCU researchers using state-of-the-art computational science technologies and methodologies.

Alabama A&M University (AAMU) is one of the HBCU members. In 1999, DOE-MICS awarded AAMU a Grant to conduct High performance computational (HPC) science research and education [2]. In 2003, a new DOE grant was awarded to AAMU to continue this effort [3]. The goal was to encourage faculty and students to become more involved in computational science activities through establishment of high performance computing laboratory, computational science research, student scholarship, student internship, student research, and collaborative research involving ORNL scientists. In the past six years,

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Qian, C., & Deng, Z., & Seweryniak, G. (2007, June), Enhancing Minority Engineering Education At Aamu Through Doe Sponsored Project Paper presented at 2007 Annual Conference & Exposition, Honolulu, Hawaii. 10.18260/1-2--2097