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Alumni, College of Engineering, EVENTS, FACULTY, FEATURED, GRANTS, NEWS, RESEARCH, Research and Sponsored Programs, SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES

With Engineering Clinic, TSU Students May Soon Design and Build Computer Games, Small Machines

November 30, 2015 Lucas Johnson

Engineering-11 — A new “engineering clinic” will allow students to design and build products related to their discipline. (Photo by John Cross, TSU Media Relations)

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (TSU News Service) – Engineering and computer science students at Tennessee State University may soon be able to design and build products such as hand-held computer games, mobile robots, computer apps and small machines, thanks to a new funding from the National Science Foundation.

A $1.7 million, four-year grant intended to revamp the curriculum and increase the graduation rate of African-American males in engineering, will also include the creation of an “engineering clinic,” which will allow students to design and build products related to their discipline.

“We are developing an innovative way of learning that would enhance students’ persistence and better prepare them for the rigors of the engineering coursework,” said Dr. S. Keith Hargrove, dean of the College of Engineering and principal investigator of the NSF funding.

According to Hargrove there is a demand to produce a more diverse workforce by developing curriculums that reflect theoretical and practical knowledge and allow graduates to immediately make a contribution to industry. But incoming freshmen are less prepared for the rigors of the engineering curriculum in such areas as math. Only 5.5 percent of black eighth-graders completed calculus five years later, and a mere 1.1 percent of the nation’s black college freshmen enrolled in engineering programs in 2010, an analysis by the National Association of Black Engineers shows.

With the new funding, Tennessee State University, the largest producer of African American engineers in the state, is responding to this workforce demand, Hargrove said.

“We have developed a pre-engineering sequence of courses for freshmen that students must take before embarking on the traditional four-year curriculum,” he said. “These courses are infused with hands-on design projects to motivate and inform students about the discipline, and promote team dynamics and engineering fundamentals.”

Freshman Mechanical Engineering major Isaiah Pirtle, a beneficiary of the pre-engineering program, has seen great progress in his performance.

“I was fortunate to participate in the ‘Engineering Concepts Institute,’ a summer pre-college program,” Pirtle said. “That experience gave me an excellent academic background for the mathematics required in my major.”

According to Hargrove, with that preparation, Pirtle and his fellow classmates’ program for the next five years will focus on more design-related projects with the development of the engineering clinic.

Dr. Sachin Shetty, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Co-PI of the NFS fund, will manage the project and the development of the clinic. The project will also support a retention study on the attrition of African-American students, with particular emphasis on black males. Faculty from the Department of Sociology Department and College of Education will coordinate the study.

Department of Media Relations
Tennessee State University
3500 John Merritt Boulevard
Nashville, Tennessee 37209
615.963.5331

About Tennessee State University

With more than 9,000 students, Tennessee State University is Nashville’s only public university, and is a comprehensive, urban, co-educational, land-grant university offering 38 undergraduate, 22 graduate and seven doctoral programs. TSU has earned a top 20 ranking for Historically Black Colleges and Universities according to U.S. News and World Report, and rated as one of the top universities in the country by Washington Monthly for social mobility, research and community service. Founded in 1912, Tennessee State University celebrated 100 years in Nashville during 2012. Visit the University online at tnstate.edu.

Alumni, FACULTY, FEATURED, GRANTS, NEWS, RESEARCH, Research and Sponsored Programs

Tennessee State University joins Consortium to Improve the Nation’s Cyber Security in Energy Delivery Systems

October 22, 2015 Emmanuel Freeman

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (TSU News Service) – Tennessee State University will participate in a five-year, $28.1 million U.S. Department of Energy initiative to improve computer/communication networks for energy delivery systems like power grids and pipelines, the agency announced recently.

TSU researchers will join a consortium of 11 universities and national laboratories led by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign to improve the resilience and security of the cyber networks. These networks serve as the backbone of the infrastructure that delivers energy to the nation – known as energy delivery systems – for the electric power, oil and gas industries.

The university will receive $930,000 to conduct studies in security risk assessment, software-defined networking, robust control systems, and detection and classification of the impact of attacks on cyber-physical systems. TSU researchers will also design controller procedures to protect against specific attack categories.

Dr. Sachin Shetty, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a cyber security and networking systems expert, will lead the effort as project director. He will be assisted by Dr. L.H. Keel, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, as co-PI.

“The security of critical infrastructure, such as power grids, oil and gas refineries, nuclear power reactors and pipeline operations has attracted tremendous attention,” Shetty said. “There is growing awareness in the industry to safeguard cyber and physical resiliency and move beyond cyber security to ensure the nation’s energy delivery systems can operate in the presence of attacks caused by adversarial actions.”

The DOE has determined that the cyber network that supports many important functions within energy delivery systems is vulnerable to disturbances, Shetty added. He said the Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium (CREDC) is intended to identify and perform cutting-edge research and increase the resiliency of energy delivery systems. This includes helping industry identify reasons for investing in technology that increases cyber resiliency in EDS; developing, validating, and verifying high-impact solutions in partnership with industry advocates; and making developed solutions commercially available through development of open-source communities and licensing arrangements.

Dr. S. Keith Hargrove, dean of the College of Engineering, called the partnership with the CREDC part of his college’s “strategic initiative” to train and educate a more diverse workforce in cyber security.

“The Cyber Resilient Energy Delivery Consortium will respond to the Department of Energy ‘s demand for detection, analysis, monitoring, and risk assessment technologies to protect energy delivery systems,” Hargrove said. “It also will further enhance TSU’s capacity in cyber security.”

As part of an outreach effort, during the study, TSU will also focus on enhancing curriculum to incorporate EDS cyber security and cyber-resiliency issues, Shetty said. “The (TSU) team will focus on workforce development at undergraduate and graduate levels to provide a pipeline of well-trained engineers for these sectors.”

In addition to TSU and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the consortium includes research experts from Argonne National Laboratory, Arizona State University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oregon State University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Rutgers University, University of Houston and Washington State University.

Department of Media Relations
Tennessee State University
3500 John Merritt Boulevard
Nashville, Tennessee 37209
615.963.5331

About Tennessee State University

FACULTY, FEATURED, GRANTS, NEWS

TSU to Host Defense Department Center of Excellence on Cyber Security

May 5, 2015 Emmanuel Freeman

University to be part of $5 million multi-institution grant

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (TSU News Service) – Since the 1970s, the area of cyberspace has developed into a constant evolving system of internet-based technologies that could cripple the nation and the U.S. military.

No longer is the battle confined to a geographical area. Military commands at every level now face threats from cyberspace of potential attacks that can cause serious damage to the military’s infrastructure, such as hacking into systems to introduce malware, malicious hardware and crashing networks.

Now, in an attempt to counter cyberthreats from other countries, the U.S. Defense Department will develop a new strategy on how to respond to foreign threat with, Tennessee State University at the forefront by helping reduce the potential risk stemming from cyber attacks.

To counter future threats to the nation’s military capabilities, the Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded a $5 million collaborative grant to three universities, including TSU, to establish a Center of Excellence in Cyber Security. Old Dominion University and Norfolk State University are the other members of the five-year cooperative team.

The Center, according to the AFRL, will advance the research capabilities of Historically Black Colleges and Universities and other Minority-Serving Institutions. It will also contribute to the education of students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and provide additional research opportunities for faculty.

“The Center of Excellence will respond to the Department of Defense’s demand for analysis, detection and response technologies to protect the cyber infrastructure,” said Dr. S.K. Hargrove, dean of the College of Engineering. “The Center will further enhance TSU’s research capacity in cyber security.”

The research objective of the grant, made on behalf of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, is to create a Center of Excellence to develop a big data analytics enabled Cyber Analysis, Simulation and Experimentation Environment (CASE-V) to enhance situational awareness and decision-support capabilities for cyber defense and training.

The Center will have a satellite site at TSU, headed by Dr. Sachin Shetty, associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He will operate specific task orders with the Cyber Security Laboratory within the TIGER (TSU Interdisciplinary Graduate Engineering Research) Institute, located in the Research & Sponsored Programs Building.

“The Center of Excellence will develop analysis, detection and response capabilities to counter future advanced persistent threats plaguing the DoD cyber infrastructure,” said Shetty. “In addition, the Center will also develop a Live-Virtual-Constructive test bed to conduct cyber planning and training activities, as well as enable increased synergistic research collaboration with government, industry and HBCU partners.”

This is the second award TSU has received from the AFRL to study the development, discovery and integration of warfighting technologies to support air, space and cyberspace forces with the Department of Defense. In November 2013, the College of Engineering received a multiyear grant worth nearly $2 million to study power sources for air and space vehicles, and to study how to intelligently adapt communications and networks to provide friendly forces unfettered and reliable communications during joint forces operations.

Department of Media Relations

Tennessee State University
3500 John Merritt Boulevard
Nashville, Tennessee 37209
615.963.5331

About Tennessee State University

With more than 9,000 students, Tennessee State University is Nashville’s only public university, and is a comprehensive, urban, co-educational, land-grant university offering 45 undergraduate, 24 graduate and seven doctoral programs. TSU has earned a top 20 ranking for Historically Black Colleges and Universities according to U.S. News and World Report, and rated as one of the top universities in the country by Washington Monthly for social mobility, research and community service. Founded in 1912, Tennessee State University celebrated 100 years in Nashville during 2012. Visit the University online at tnstate.edu.