Driving Outcomes

Traci talks with LaVal Brewer, President and CEO of South County Outreach (SCO) on today’s podcast. SCO’s core mission is to prevent hunger and homelessness by helping people help themselves. SCO’s focus is love and help from the community not on the social stigmatism associated with needing help. SCO addresses resource food desert situations where food is needed in areas that socioeconomically would not be expected but is a necessary resource to help individuals in need. LaVal discusses with Traci how the pandemic changed SCO's approach to how they servepeople with their food pantry and of the rebranding of the organization's ultimate vision to help end hunger.

For individuals that want to help themselves SCO provides assistance with housing and food. Additionally through SCO's computer lab, the organization also enhances an individual’s skills to obtain job opportunities to be able to provide for themselves in the long term thus helping to put an end to hunger.

Julie Serafin, Director of Science and Research at WV Higher Education Policy Commission joins Traci on today's podcast. Julie helps faculty at higher institutions at WV obtain federal funding from NSF and other entities by connecting researchers with specific programs. She helps provide feedback on how to make the grant more successful with NSF to make sure it gets funded. Julie is specifically in charge of the West Virginia Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) project.

Her office administers grants from EPSCOR to build research infrastructure in the state of WV to build industry and workforce. This includes a STEM speaker series along with a magazine to help educate the public on various topics from volcanoes, water resources in the state of WV, and gravitational wave astrophysics in the hopes to bring awareness to inspire young people.

Dr. Xinnan Du, Program Manager and Outreach Director in research in physics and astronomy from UCR, talks with Traci on today's podcast. She talks about her involvement in the educational outreach program which encourages students to pursue higher education in STEM fields, including astronomy. Xinnan provides examples of careers that are related to astronomy and how their skill set can be utilized in other fields, too. To learn more on virtual events that are free to the public you can visit https://physics.ucr.edu/news-events/community-outreach

Dongming Mei, Director, CUBED/Professor Physics at the University of South Dakota shares with Traci what the PIRE program is and his focus on nuclear research and dark matter as a multi-country collaboration. He further elaborates on the National Science Foundation’s interest in this research and how USD received a $4.35 million grant from NSF to help advance germanium materials for developing detectors and other technologies in the study of dark matter and neutrinos as a multi-country collaboration and global community effort. Dongming explains the positive outcome of nuclear research and the uses that nuclear matter can have that extend beyond our political understanding or fears.

Steve Allison Associate Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology & Earth System Science and Courtney Hunt Academic Coordinator of UCI both join Traci on today’s podcast.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the Ridge 2 Reef graduate program tackles a wide range of ecological challenges for Orange County. Steve and Courtney discuss how environment ties to culture and vice versa and how one of their research projects is a relationship between COVID19 and sewage water.

Leyla Riley is the Executive Director of the OC STEM Initiative, which is housed in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. Leyla works to foster Orange County’s economic competitiveness and sustainability through promoting STEM competencies across the educational continuum through the creation of public-private partnerships between community stakeholders, including but not limited to K12 schools, higher education, industry, government and philanthropic foundations. Take a deep dive with Leyla as she explains the foci of OC STEM and how you can get involved. Leyla discusses what she does by focusing on research and the OC STEM ecosystem and her role there.

Bimal Nepal, Associate Professor in the Industrial Distribution Program at Texas A&M University, joins Traci on today’s podcast to discuss the $7 trillion industry. Dr. Nepal’s research interests cover a wide range of topics in industrial distribution and manufacturing. Those include: inventory management, lean six-sigma, pricing optimization, supplier management, transportation optimization, production and operations analysis, quality and reliability, and new product development.

Bimal and Traci discuss the impact and skillset industrial distribution students gain and the steps Texas A&M is doing to connect higher education to industry. Dr. Nepal talks about how lean six sigma research will help optimize manufacturing and the diversity/inclusion of women in STEM.

Mike Gallo, Director, Research Development of the University of California, Irvine joins Traci on today’s podcast. Mike’s role at UCI is strategic in nature and he helps principal investigators (PIs) vet proposals that are likely to get funded. Mike discusses how competitive the research field has become now with limited availability of funds combined with the growing number of research institutions and funds have decreased significantly due to lack of increase of funding despite the increase in inflation. Mike explains what it is that PIs need to understand to be successful at winning grant proposals and get funded as well as what research institutes need to understand to bring in more funding.

Linda Christopher, Manager for Grants and Project Development of Riverside Unified School District ("RUSD") shares how as a school district it was decided to pursue a National Science Foundation grant to show themselves as the pioneers in ascertaining funds typically pursued only by higher education directly, yet RUSD is still working with UCR and others. Linda Christopher further discusses the end to end research that focuses on grades K-12 with a specific focus on high school students and the data resulting from the students exposure to air pollution.

Linda and her team are a leading example of innovation by her school district because of their pursuit to obtain federal funds which can be a paradigm to other school districts seeking funding in a time of need where innovation, creativity, and collaboration are paramount. Presently most federal research grants are pursued by higher education institutions only.

Wendy Schluchter, Ph.D. Professor and Chair from the University of New Orleans joins Traci on today’s podcast. During this podcast you will hear how Mardi Gras is being celebrated during this unusual time we are all experiencing, how it was celebrated this year and how it relates to Wendy’s New Orleans background.

Wendy had the opportunity to speak about the most common professional fields and industries that most students pursue after receiving their degrees in microbiology. She concludes her portion of the podcast by discussing how microbiology is multi-disciplined. Many microbiology students pursue medicine, and many of them, in preparation of becoming a doctor, will need to minor in technology or engineering to stand out or be competitive in their respective fields.