Hero of the Week: Dr. Kyana Young, Marquette University Strategic Innovation Fund

May 15, 2018

4:46 p.m.

Photo Credit: Erin Bloodgood

Dr. Kyana Young, a postdoctoral fellow at Marquette University (MU), began working in the Global Water Center in 2016. With a background in environmental engineering, Young’s passion is finding solutions for safe water to improve global and public health. Soon after she arrived, it occurred to her that there was a lack of diverse groups of people represented in the building. But it didn’t take her long to do something about that.

She spoke with staff at Marshall High School and Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)—including Larry Farris, Toby Hairston, Rochelle Sandrin, Jan Haven and Megan Sun—who helped her come up with an idea for a program that would provide opportunities to demographics that are underrepresented in scientific fields relating to water research.

She applied for a grant from MU with the support of the group at MPS and was awarded the university’s Strategic Innovation Fund Grant. The grant made it possible for her to provide internships to students at Marshall and bring them to the labs of the Global Water Center to do hands-on research. When working in the classroom at the high school, the youth learn how to write lab reports and do data analysis with their teacher, Megan Sun. The students are taught how to apply their newly learned scientific knowledge to solve real world problems.

Each student is assigned a project for the semester by participating companies and universities. Young asked these organizations to host and mentor the youth; organizations such as Stonehouse Water Technologies, Youth Rising Up, Solar Water Works, DRM International, Sun Yat Sen University, Grand Valley State University, Assembly of God, as well as MU. Young knew that the students needed more than community partners; they needed mentors like Moe Mukiibi, chief technology officer at Stonehouse Water Technologies (the company with the most interns in the program), to make the program a success.

The program is meant to “create a path for [students] that could be life-changing, so that they can see why they are working in a lab and see what this can become,” says Mukiibi. “When you provide an opportunity, and you back that up with resources, this is what can happen,” says Young as she describes how the students have excelled far beyond expectations. “This impacts the global community.”

Thanks to Kyana Young, our Hero of the Week, and the team at MPS, these students have a chance to explore their interests and realize career paths that can make a major difference in their lives.

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Comments (2)

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Another "tech" view...

I went to an annual stockholders meeting for an energy utility company with Wisconsin roots. You would think that it would all be about greed, how to keep profits at a maximum, no matter what workers and customers would be losing... Business is all about the OWNER making money, right?

Now, not every stockholder owns a controlling interest of shares of company stock. It is distributed among many little people. In the case of a Wisconsin power utility, the roots come from our rural-focused "Electric Cooperative" days... the infamous co-op, as "socialist" as a hippie commune, right? It was Wisconsin farmers who realized that they needed electricity out on their dairy farms, they needed to cool that milk fast to make it safe and valuable to the dairy processors. City power utilities did not find it "profitable" to run expensive copper wire miles into the "more cows than people" countryside for the benefit of small customers who could not afford to pay like rich city folk.

So the famers got together and formed their partnership of lots of farms, paid enough to run the lines out there to get what they needed. They were all "shareholder-owners" of their electrical cooperative. Decades later, these co-ops were bought up by the mainstream electric companies, and their shares of co-op stock were converted to shares of utility stock.

The focus of most of the meeting was on how all efforts are now into renewable and alternative energy, no more "clean coal" or any fossil fueled power plants any more. Lots of Wind and Solar facilities being invested in, they see a useful future in not being at the mercy of an oil company or coal mine operator (like Trump claims to be supporting "dirty coal" of West Virginia, or McCain-Palin saying "drill baby drill"... you say anything to get votes.)

They even showcased a plug-in hybrid compact SUV. IMHO, the heavier vehicles is where hybrid technology should be used, not on tiny cars. People want the ride, safety, and security of the big heavy gas guzzler, but that is what is in most need of regenerative braking to recover the forward energy in batteries, primed and ready for the next acceleration to cruising speed, good for city, good for backroads too. That's why CAFE standards do not matter anymore, people buy Trucks and SUVs instead of cars and sedans. Your F150 costs more than your Cadillac these days.

They also showcase the charging stations they are placing around some towns for these plug in hybrids. Free for now, but someday we pay on the meter.

The interesting thing is that the big wind farm they are investing in is in Iowa, not in Wisconsin. That is because many people in Wisconsin (New Berlin?) would rather drive a diesel pickup with a "take that Obama" bumper sticker blowing out thick smoke than see a "Liberal" wind turbine.

Funny thing is that most of the people sitting around me in this annual meeting were those typical farm-land Conservatives, no liberal hippies anywhere in sight.

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 6 years ago

How many see "Stereotypes at Work" here?

I am a white man of German descent who grew up in Wisconsin. I was raised by farm-raised parents from western Wisconsin, my youth exposed me to the Madison TV news where we saw "hippies" protesting the Vietnam war, I did not see the Milwaukee TV news where the focus was on black housing protests in that area.

Yes, I grew up being exposed to many Conservative stereotypes taught merely by example and the phrase "Common Sense". I saw the old TV shows and movies of the 60's, 70's, and 80's that reinforced these stereotypes. I saw how life was simply less challenging for the average person when people clearly fit into their stereotypes shown by their skin color, their hair length, their clothes, their "accent". First impressions was how life was lived.

Through those years was the impression that college research was not so "white" as the rest of the students there. It took awhile to realize that this was because private industry was hiring the white grads as soon as they earned their 4 year degrees, but passing over the non-whites, so they would have to stay in school as grad students, becoming Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Research Assistants... just adding to the "liberal" reputation of colleges that Conservative whites were suspicious of. These people were teaching their own white kids at a closer level than the professors were?

... but what does this really tell people like me? The greatest fear my kind have always known, that the "Bell Curve" that says whites are inherently more intelligent than blacks (and browns) is a lie, that there was a more self-serving reason to keep them from getting the kind of education that allowed them to be more than janitors and outdoor laborers.

This was the true reason people who looked like me wanted to ensure the failure of MPS, to replace them with "parochial schools" that did not teach people outside the school operators' stereotypes. In fact, our business leaders even wanted our own whites who were not born into money to be taught no more than the "10 Commandments" and the "3-R's", they wanted loyal workers who only did what they were told, did not second guess the strategic motives of "management" when told to make a machine that Mexicans could run, who would not aspire to move up the ladder.

Oh, we selected a few people for the "Science, Technology, Engineering, Math" (STEM) route, they were to be our inventors who invented what their managers told them to. They were to be narrow-focused nerds who did not think about business or economic fairness, or whether the things they were inventing were good for mankind as a whole.

Nerds are not the enemy, nor are non-whites the enemy. We really do need all people to understand each other's culture and way of life so that they can work for the greater good, to create a world that includes. Otherwise you create people who prefer war against those who are "not like them".

SE Wisc. Citizen more than 6 years ago