auguste

ATLAS Commencement Spring 2021

Anonymous — Wed, 02 Jun 2021 23:55:11 +0000

ATLAS Commencement Spring 2021 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/02/2021 - 17:55

Despite a challenging academic year, this spring 42 ATLAS students earned BS degrees in Creative Technology and Design, three received MS-Social Impact degrees and 11 received degrees in MS-Creative Industries. Donna Auguste, who earned a PhD in Technology, Media and Society in 2019 and is now the CEO of Auguste Research Group, delivered the guest address.

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Opening Doors

Anonymous — Mon, 06 May 2019 19:11:58 +0000

Opening Doors Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/06/2019 - 13:11

The dissertations of all five 2019 graduates of the ATLAS Institute's PhD in Technology, Media & Society program emphasize empowering groups that tend to be less engaged in engineering fields. The five graduates are all women, itself a group that is underrepresented in engineering.

“There are opportunities to make our learning systems more equitable, empowering and inclusive of the amazing diversity in the human experience,” says Abigale Stangl, a graduating PhD student who researched how to make media and information systems more accessible for people who are blind or visually impaired. “We need to think about how to change social conversations about what’s possible for people of all different abilities.”

Women, people with disabilities, and most minority groups, including African Americans, Latinos, American Indians and Alaska Natives are all underrepresented in science and engineering (S&E), according to the 2019 Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities Report by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. The proportion of the underrepresented groups is lowest in engineering, computer sciences and physics.

Mark Gross, director of the ATLAS Institute, points out that ATLAS PhD students embrace many topics and this clustering is a little unusual, but that ATLAS is a place that seeks to empower everyone to engage with technology and engineering. “Historically, engineering and computing have been dominated by white men like me," says Gross. He references the research of this year's ATLAS graduation speaker, inventor Leah Buechley, a CU ��«��Ƶ alumna with a PhD in computer science from the College of Engineering and Applied Science; she pointed out in a paper that of the 36 covers of Make Magazine published to date, 85 percent featured white males. None were people of color.

"Until we change those numbers, we’re missing out on great talent. Our graduating PhD students exemplify that talent," adds Gross.

In their dissertations, Donna Auguste and Simone Hyater-Adams sought to broaden African American participation in STEM fields, Auguste via researching the bond between STEM learning and STEM identities and Hyater-Adams through using performing arts and digital media to attract underrepresented students; Stangl examined how to make media and information systems more accessible for people who are blind or visually impaired; Hyunjoo Oh created design tools that enable children to design and build mechanical systems, drawing children in by making those systems playful and engaging; and Brittany Kos researched the barriers women and non-binary students face in participating in hackathons.

For her dissertation defense, Hyater-Adams began by reading a poem about her personal struggle to balance her passion for both the arts and physics while simultaneously two dancers interpreted and performed her story.

“I have always been a scientist and an artist, and that intersection has always been important to me,” Hyater-Adams said.

Auguste plans to use what she learned from her doctoral research to encourage African American youth to enter STEM fields. Auguste worked with families to monitor air quality with sensors to identify possible triggers of asthma attacks and other health issues.

“While the PhD is wonderful, my successful outcome will be reaching the kids,” Auguste says. “ I want to reach them by the thousands.”

ATLAS PhD students seek to empower groups not traditionally engaged in engineering.

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Donna Auguste honored by Tau Beta Pi with ‘eminent engineer’ title

Anonymous — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 18:37:43 +0000

Donna Auguste honored by Tau Beta Pi with ‘eminent engineer’ title Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/22/2018 - 12:37

Donna Auguste, right, and Sandy Pitzak, left, stand by the Bent of Tau Beta Pi at the entrance to CU ��«��Ƶ's engineering center.

Donna Auguste, ATLAS PhD student, is the first person at CU ��«��Ƶ in roughly a decade to receive the prestigious "eminent engineer" designation from the nation's oldest engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi. Auguste was inducted into CU ��«��Ƶ's chapter on October 13.

"It's a great honor to be part of an organization that encourages engineering excellence as well as personal integrity," said Auguste, whose initiation ceremony was witnessed by roughly 500 people during the Tau Beta Pi convention in Denver.

Staff from Tau Beta Pi's national office made the decision based on Auguste's research at ATLAS as well as her extensive service to communities, said Sandy Pitzak, chief advisor of CU ��«��Ƶ's chapter.

"An 'eminent engineer' sets a good example for the students, and Donna is an excellent example," she said.

Auguste's latest research, coined "DataTip," promotes interest in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) among children and families of color by making STEM topics relevant to their daily lives. Her strategy includes providing state-of-the-art air quality sensors to African American families who have children with asthma. When sensors detect airborne compounds that can trigger asthma attacks, such as particulates from cooking or chemicals from cleaning, they pass that information on to family members' cell phones. As family members learn to draw correlations between data about airborne compounds and their asthma symptoms, Auguste observes the actions they take to reduce the irritants in their homes. She explores emerging STEM identities among family members who take an interest in the sensor technology and methods of working with the data.

Auguste uses a Markes Micro-chamber to extract volatile organic compounds from a sample.

Auguste said her concern about the declining numbers of minorities employed in STEM fields led her to return to academia for her PhD.

“I’ve developed sensor technology and data science technology over the past few years,” she said. “I had ideas about how those platforms could be used to engage diverse communities with STEM, but I needed to learn more about interdisciplinary research methodologies, such as education research and ethnographic discourse analysis, to pull it all together.”

The origins of Auguste’s enthusiasm for introducing young students of color to STEM traces back to her own experience as a successful engineer and entrepreneur in technology. After working on artificial intelligence in the mid-1980s for Intellicorp, she was hired by Apple and eventually tapped to be lead software engineer on the company’s first personal digital assistant, the Newton. In the 1990s, she moved to ��«��Ƶ and launched her own company, Freshwater Software, which provided software for maintaining and monitoring web applications, attracting clients like Barnes and Noble, Amazon, IBM, Microsoft and Merrill Lynch.

After Auguste successfully negotiated the sale of Freshwater Software in 2001, she established a foundation, Leave a Little Room, that provided housing, electricity and vaccinations to poor and underprivileged communities around the world. In Tanzania, her organization built and expanded schools, installed solar electricity in small medical clinics to power vaccine refrigerators, and set up ham radio and other communications systems for remote health clinics. In Ethiopia, Leave a Little Room built a middle school and equipped it with books and computers. And in Mexico, the foundation built small homes and a pediatric clinic in a remote community. Most recently, Auguste helped to equip a makerspace at the University of Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in Sept. 2017.

Tau Beta Pi was founded in 1885 to recognize those who confer honor upon their alma mater through distinguished scholarship and exemplary character as students of engineering, or through their attainments as engineers following graduation.

Donna Auguste, ATLAS PhD student, is the first person at CU ��«��Ƶ in roughly a decade to receive the prestigious "eminent engineer" designation from the national engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi.

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