IRES Track I: USA-China: International Research Experience for Native American Students in IoT Enabled Environmental Monitoring Technologies

University Of South Alabama, Mobile AL

Investigators

Abstract

This IRES project is co-funded by OISE and EPSCoR. Twelve Native American students from five Tribal Colleges in the state of North Dakota will participate in a six-week summer program over the course of three years. Each year, four students will form a cohort and participate in pre-training in the U.S. and then visit and study at the host University in Beijing, China for five weeks. All three student cohorts will focus on one unifying topic - building and testing an Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled environmental monitoring system. During the course of the research training and after the project is finished, a deep and comprehensive evaluation will be conducted to assess three key aspects of the program: 1) instructional training and research experience, 2) global professional and cultural experience; and 3) student mentoring. This program will greatly benefit participating students. This is an international learning experience that may be the key highlight of student participants' academic careers, which may be especially true for Native American students, as they have less chances for performing research abroad. The program will provide participating students with unique opportunities to become globally-engaged scientists and to build their international scientific networks. There are five Tribal Colleges in the state of North Dakota that represent historic tribal nations. The recruitment of this program from these Tribal Colleges will ensure a regionally diverse student group will receive international mentoring and research-based education. In many large cities of U.S., there are environmental problems similar to Beijing, so the monitoring technology learned by participating students will provide valuable reference and an essential technology reserve. The participating students will build peer-mentoring skills and learn about the unique culture and traditions of China from Beijing, the culture center of China. Student participants will learn to design advanced environmental monitoring systems that integrate energy harvest and remote control, which can track all four categories of environmental contaminants including metals, radioisotopes, volatile organic contaminants, and biological contaminants. In this project, tasks for student participants include sensor developments, interface circuits designs, wireless sensor network designs for Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled systems to realize environmental monitoring, testing the proposed monitoring system on laboratory and field sites, and making reliability-based lifetime analyses. The proposed system is a much-needed technology for environmental decision-making that will help substantially reduce ecological and human-health threats from environmental problems, and the implemented prototype and test data will be a significant reference for the other academic researchers and industrial developers. Evaluation data collection will occur sequentially using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data measurements to assess the effectiveness of the program. The primary goals of this program are to: 1) provide students with training and mentoring in international-based engineering applications that will create a positive effect in their professional and personal lives, 2) create Native American experts in environmental monitoring and protection, and 3) improve specialized environmental management in the remote areas. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.