$5 million robotic vehicles grant will also boost minorities in STEM fields

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Students at work on a robotics project in Jamshidi's ACE Laboratory.

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(July 10, 2015) -- It all started about 20 years ago, when UTSA’s Mo Jamshidi received a $6.4 million grant from NASA to find a way to elevate minorities to the highest education levels in science and technology.

“I quickly found these students are not easily found,” said Jamshidi, Lutcher Brown Endowed Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “The priority for many of them was to work and support their families.”

Jamshidi’s solution was a simple one.

“I created a model to nourish them from early on so they get excited about science and technology, and they’re motivated to go on to college and pursue higher degrees,” he said.

In Jamshidi’s model, called Vertically Integrated Projects (VI-P), high school students, undergraduates and even students from local community colleges are invited into the program to work together in groups as large as 14. They’re given a task and work alongside Ph.D. and masters candidates to accomplish it.

“It’s peer pressure but in a positive way,” he said. “These teenagers were seeing how getting educated leads to having an office, teaching classes and getting job offers. Kids were excited about coming to college and reaching for that.”

The model is now part of a three-institution, $5 million Department of Defense grant to develop large-scale autonomous vehicles. Jamshidi seized the funding opportunity to recruit minorities into a STEM field.

“The previous NASA program produced about 117 master’s and Ph.D. candidates in 6 years,” he said. “They’re all minorities. Four Ph.D. candidates were Native American, which is amazing and incredibly rare.”

Today, Jamshidi has 16 of his 26 current robotics students working with him under the DoD grant in his Autonomous Control Engineering Laboratory, where his students have worked on renewable energy, unmanned aerial systems and Cloud computing, among other projects. The grant money makes it possible for Jamshidi to pay the students for their time, which in turn helps pay for their education.

“I’m using the model to accelerate and expedite their knowledge, their education their graduation, and prepare them for a very successful career,” he said.

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