Shedding light onto issues related to computational biology, data analysis and how "the cloud" comes to life were the focuses recently of the first in a series of events planned using support from the National Science Foundation Computer and Information Science and Engineering Minority-Serving Institution (CISE-MSI) grant earned by the College last year for its "StEM: Stimulate, Engage and Motivate student research" initiative.
Dubbed "The StEM Seminar Series," these events aim to motivate and engage students in research activities and provide hands-on experience via research projects, training, seminars, and workshops through guidance and mentoring by academia and industry experts.
“Research proves that exposing undergraduate students in STEM fields to research is one of the best predictors of degree completion and success in postgraduate education,” said Dr. Renu Balyan, assistant professor in the Math/Computer Information Sciences Department and CISE-MSI grant principal investigator. “We were excited to host experts from both academia and industry at this seminar to begin to build knowledge and awareness for our students, and motivate them to get involved in research.”
The program featured Biology Professor Stephen Harris from SUNY Purchase along with Shane Kalil, senior account manager, and Anel Perez, senior solutions architect, from Amazon Web Services. Dr. Harris presented on the increasing importance of computational biology in biological and ecological data analysis, citing his research in genomics and bioinformatics to study the evolution, ecology, and behavior of natural populations in response to environmental change. Kalil and Perez presented "Bringing the Cloud to Life: Cloud Fundamentals & Service Impacts to Society," which included real world case studies where researchers, scientists, professors, and students have unlocked the power of AWS' cloud services to solve various challenges.
The College's StEM initiative also includes efforts to expand the technological infrastructure by acquiring new equipment to facilitate computational processing and big data analyses and expanding course-embedded undergraduate research experiences while introducing new research-focused programs and courses.
Next up is a session on April 1, 2022 where SUNY Old Westbury Mathematics Professor Frank Sanacory and in the College's M.S. in Data Science program will discuss their work while Drs. Renu Balyan and Christos Noutsos will talk about research areas students can get involved with on-campus.
In all, the College was awarded $299,498 from the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering for this and other programming through this new program directed toward Minority Serving Institutions.