CAREER OUTLOOK
Most Promising in STEM
by Lango Deen,
ldeen@ccgmag.com
Who is at the forefront of developments in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields? What are they working on, and how is it changing our lives? To get answers to these burning questions, USBE&IT magazine turned to leading researchers at historically black colleges and universities, and to an outstanding man in one of the biggest companies in the world, who is turning his success into a legacy.
his February, the National Science Foundation awarded North Carolina A&T State University $2.5 million to support the school’s role in a $25-million national consortium studying “evolution in action”. The formal name of the NSF program is BEACON: A National Science Foundation Science & Technology Center for the Study of Evolution in Action. North Carolina A&T is one of five universities involved in the program. Michigan State University is the consortium’s leader. In addition to A&T, other members are the University of Idaho, the University of Texas-Austin and University of Wash- ington. Total funding for the program is $25 million. The BEACON program will involve North Carolina A&T faculty in five departments in the College of Arts & Science, College of Engineering, Division of University Studies, as well as N.C. A&T graduate students and undergraduate students. Below are excerpts from our conversations with Dr. Gerry Dozier, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering at A&T, and Dr. Joseph L. Graves, dean of the Division of University Studies and professor of biological studies.
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USBE&IT: What is BEACON working on? Gerry Dozier: The overall goal of BEACON is to gain a better understanding of evolutionary dynamics through interdisciplinary research between evolution theo- rists, evolutionary biologists, and evolutionary practitioners—engineers and computer scientists working in the field of genetic and evolutionary computing, and [to] provide a vehicle to inform the public of how the dynamics of evolution impacts the lives of everyday people.
One objective of BEACON (and BEACON@A&T) is to allow evolutionary biolo- gists and evolution theorists to work with researchers in genetic and evolutionary com- puting, in an effort to help them develop more effective and efficient evolution-based solutions (problem solvers) for complex, real-world design, optimization, and machine learning problems.
98 USBE&IT I WINTER 2011
Dr. Gerry Dozier Chair,
Department of Computer Scence
North Carolina A&T State University
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Dr. Gerry Dozier has served as the chair of the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina A&T Univer- sity since 2007. He is also a profes- sor in the department. His areas of specialization are genetic, evolution- ary and neural computing, biometrics, distributed constraint reasoning, evo- lutionary robotics, AI/computational intelligence, and intrusion detection systems.
Dr. Dozier is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Studies in Identity Science, and the first director of the National Intelligence Science and Technology Center of Academic Excellence. This U.S.-based computer
www.blackengineer.com
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