USBE Online: This week, a joint research project between Jackson State University and the Army Corps of Engineers’ R&D organization was announced. Can you tell us about new research involving historically black engineering colleges?

Lieutenant General Robert L. Van Antwerp: Our research arm, Engineering Research and Development Center, has a number of different aspects. It has a waterways experiments station, a cold regions lab, and a materials development center, some of which deal with computers, but we have a lot of different kinds. Our relationship with the historically black colleges and minority institutions is a strong one and goes way back. What ERDC just signed recently was an update with nine educational partnership agreements. From these, we have particular agreements with a number of schools. One is with Jackson State University for high performance computational design of novel materials. We think it’s about $2.4 million per year. This is the third year of a five-year effort with them. It really is an outstanding relationship with Jackson State. We also have it with Tuskegee University. They’re collaborating with ERDC on predicting degradation of composite materials. They’re helping us out in the material realm. We do some work with Howard University in geo spatial, some with Alabama A&M. We typically we hire about six Alcorn State University students to work in ERDC in their advanced chemistry and biology lab at Elizabeth City State University. All that’s to say a lot is going on and we very much appreciate and cherish the relationship we have with universities and they do a lot to help us out as we are trying to accomplish our mission in the Corps of Engineers.

USBE Online: Dr. Val Emery recently got awards for his work with historically black colleges and universities and minority institutions. How does the USACE plan to build on these recruitment and academic relationships?

LTG Antwerp: Dr. Emery used to work for the Corps but he now works for the Army Research Lab. He worked with us up till 1999. When he worked at our research lab in ERDC, he was very much instrumental in what we’ve come to today with our work with minority institutions and historically black colleges. Engineers and scientists are not represented, as is the rest of the population of minorities. We have under representation in those disciplines, and we are very interested in increasing the numbers of African Americans, Hispanics, women and all other minorities that would enter the engineering field. This is a long-term effort. For instance, we have a relationship and a contract with HENAAC, which works with the Hispanic community out in Los Angeles, California, to work on K-12 groups and really get them enthused about engineering. We’ve got a number of relationships with Black Engineer of the Year groups, where we are trying to increase the number of young people that are taking math and science in their earlier years so that they don’t inadvertently opt out of engineering later on. In addition, we are really looking at all engineering schools, because minority students are in all kinds of schools. You can find them at Stanford, or you can find them in a historically black college or university. In fact, I was just talking to a member of the board of the Society of American Military Engineers, an African American. He has his own company. He went to The Citadel, and he was a great representative there. He’s back in there trying to recruit minorities into the engineering field. With these multi-pronged attacks, one of the great things is that we have is that we are at the point where we are hiring people right now, and we are out looking at colleges and universities that can help us get our mission done.

USBE Online: Referring back to the K-12 mention you made, and encouraging more kids to focus on math and science so that they can go into STEM disciplines at college and, hopefully, go on to STEM careers. What is the Corps doing nationwide to prepare kids for 21st-century jobs?

LTG Antwerp: We’re involved and associated in many ways with the Society of American Military Engineers, which for the last four years has really taken on K through 12, with a special emphasis on minority students. They have a number of camps that they run in the summer. One is at the Air Force Academy, one’s at Fort Wanini, out in California. These camps are a weeklong and meant to bring young students in to get them enthused about engineering. The Corps part in that is we get

Dr. Tomekia Simeon (in blue) takes students from Jackson State University on a tour of the DoD supercomputer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers research organization, the Engineer Research and Development Center. Dr. Simeon is a computational chemist and a former student of JSU.

LTG Antwerp: One of the things that all of us in the engineering field is working on is sustainability and green engineering. In the particular case you’re talking about, what we’re doing is environmental and socio-economic research with them, so that we can increase the sustainability of our projects. By that we mean that they are more energy efficient, that they use materials that are more environmentally friendly—all the way from development of those materials to the use of those materials to the disposal of those materials. We are looking for things that will last longer and give us longer service. All of those things are in the area of what we call sustainable engineering. One of the interesting things they are working on, and we’ve got this built in to a number of our designs now, is how do you use rainwater that drops on the property or on the building? In a particular case of a hospital we’re building in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, every drop of water that falls on that building will be collected and used for either irrigation or some other appropriate purpose which obviously helps out water supply and other things.

USBE Online: How does the Corps plan to build on long-term commitments of HBCUs and the Corps to promote environmental and socio-economic research, increase knowledge related to the sustainable use and management of environmental resources, and promote the application of information systems for sustainable resource management?

LTG Antwerp: That really goes back to where we began with our research lab entering these educational partnerships with universities. Number one: we want the universities to work on those things that are important in the industry. I think it is really good for students because it takes them away from the theory and the academic and gets them to practical application. The other part that happens with these partnerships is that young students get to rub elbows with scientists and engineers and our educators that work out in the field. I think it’s a great connection, and I applaud the universities for stretching out on that and not just relying on just what goes on in the institutions, but reach out to what is really going on in industry. When you do that, I think you are building an excitement for what could be their profession. The other thing that it does is it allows students to get to see. My wife’s a nurse and when she was going through nursing school, she did what they call the rounds. You’d go to prenatal, and then maybe to the emergency, and then the operating room. All that is designed to help you determine where your passion is and what you’d like to do. I think a lot of good comes out of these partnerships, not the least of which is we’re trying to help students to decide what they want to do later in life and what they might be passionate about.

Not only are minorities under represented in the engineering field, but also as a country we are growing fewer engineers in the aggregate. We need engineers, and encouragement you and the universities can do. What we are doing in the Corps of Engineers, in each of our divisions, is to talk to all the universities in their footprint. And we basically cover the entire United States. We are talking to the deans of engineering departments, people that do project management, people in environmental engineering, and in systems engineering to really encourage students to stay with it, and be part of the great engineering workforce of the future. If not, we’re going to find out that we have to hire that in off shore from other countries, because they are growing their engineering population. China, for instance, this year will graduate twice as many engineers from their universities as the United States. 

One last thing, we were recently at the Black Engineer of the Year Awards. We do a workshop there with the Corps of Engineers and we bring all our African American engineers in and they rub close with the students. We also have a booth where we let people know of job opportunities. We collected 212 resumes, my folks told me. We made 28 offers and we have 18 new employees that came out of the Black Engineer of the Year week. Our goal is to double that next year. We were very appreciative that we had that many young people that were willing to come and take a good look at us.