Fifty-seven students and recent alumni of Advanced Technological Education (ATE) projects shared their work during a poster session this week at the 2025 ATE Principal Investigators’ Conference in Washington, D.C.
Many of the students displayed findings from authentic research projects, others focused on what they accomplished during internships, and some documented the hands-on learning they did under the guidance of ATE principal investigators who have received National Science Foundation (NSF) funding to test their innovative technician education ideas.
The 90-minute session is always high energy with enthusiastic students telling individuals and small groups of the 800 conference attendees about their endeavors.
Sometimes these brief presentations lead to other things, as they did for Fatima Farzam, a Los Angeles Pierce College (California) student who displayed the next-generation gene sequencing she did to profile the gut microbiome of two horses stabled at the college’s equestrian center. Farzam’s poster caught the attention of Bridgette Kirkpatrick, a biotechnology professor at Collin College (Texas), who rides horses. After listening to Farzam describe what she did and her findings, Kirkpatrick asked a few questions and shared that she was impressed with Farzam’s study.
Kirkpatrick told her that she plans to replicate Farzam’s process with her students, using samples from horses that eat only field grass and others that eat processed feed. They parted with a plan to exchange samples and for Kirkpatrick to discuss the new collaboration with Aron Kamajaya, the Pierce College biotechnology professor, who had four students participating in the conference.
Over the 32 years the American Association of Community Colleges has convened the conference with NSF support, it has sparked countless formal and informal partnerships, professional relationships and ideas that eventually led to grant proposals that have been awarded funding to benefit students.
William Atkinson, a student at Kilgore College (Texas), shared photos about how he helped set up the college’s virtual computer information technology (CIT) lab. As a graduate of the cybersecurity program, Atkinson now maintains and customizes the system for instruction as a part-time college employee. He is also taking courses toward a second associate degree in heating, ventilation, air conditioning and refrigeration. He thinks the combination of skills and knowledge will position him well for a data center technician career.
Trinity Binette, a computer programming student at Connecticut State Community College-Northwestern, was part of a team whose capstone project created a prototype large language model to extract information from scans of police reports. She thinks the team’s CrimSort program could eventually help police departments report and analyze crime data more quickly and accurately than their current expensive process of manually inputting information into a federal database.
“We are hoping to bring this further in the future. It’s really cool, and it’s working better than we expected,” Binette said.
Alexander Gose, a student at Sinclair Community College (Ohio), combined U.S. Department of Agriculture data about Ohio residents’ proximity to supermarkets with cancer incidence reports from all 88 Ohio counties. His large chart showed the statewide analysis and the finding that Montgomery County, where Sinclair is located, has the highest age-adjusted rate of breast cancer and low-income residents with low access to supermarkets. Gose and his teammates are entering their work in the DataJam competition in November. They will also share their findings with local public health officials.
Two other Sinclair horticulture students shared information about their paid internships at the Dayton Food Bank, which is located about two blocks from campus. After completing the internship, Hannabelle Millard was hired as an AmeriCorps employee. Now she helps maintain the food bank’s 40 raised-bed garden that supplies food to more than 100 organizations and promotes vermicomposting during presentations at 25 public schools.
Since her internship, Cara Black has participated in efforts to address her community’s food desert. She would eventually like to be an agriculture educator. In addition to covering the internships, NSF funding for the ATE project Preparing the Agricultural Workforce in Southwest Ohio helped to purchase hydroponics and aquaponics equipment for the Sinclair College lab, pesticide license fees for students, and fees for students to attend workshops where they gained specialized urban agriculture skills.
