Building sustainability leaders of tomorrow

The UTRGV Office of Professional Education and Workforce Development created a Sustainability Student Leadership Program to enhance leadership skills in Sustainability Fellows.

The fellows are a group of graduate students who receive scholarships for their sustainability research projects.

“My goal with this program is to develop these graduate students to really understand sustainability from three different aspects, right, not just sustainability in terms of the environment, but also from the help, and the education part of it,” said Jayshree Bhat, Professional Education and Workforce Development assistant vice president. 

Parwinder Grewal, Research, Graduate Studies and New Program Development executive vice president, said, “sustainability is how we utilize our resources, natural resources, to sustain ourselves currently and for future generations.”

The Sustainability Student Leadership Program consists of nine graduate students from various majors. These students had the option to choose which sustainability research project they wanted to work on. The students are

–Armando Garces, “Developing an Effective Detection Model for Alzheimer’s Disease: A Sustainable Solution for Therapeutic Intervention”;

–Diego Alonso and Jaafar Mouhamad, “A Renewable Energy Project at UTRGV”;

–Jacqueline Lopez, “Frontera Project: A Vehicle for Sustainable Parent Engagement and Student Success”;

–Karla Salazar, “The Physical Study of Perfluoro-Compounds and their Interactions with Water”;

–Mauricio Castellano, “From Seed to Harvest: The Pedagogical and Cognitive Development of Percussion Students from Beginner through University Graduate”;

–Omar Vazquez Perez and Zachery Johnson, “Zero Waste Project: A Food Composting Project at UTRGV”;

–and Raul Espinosa Perez, “Biosensor Capable of Detecting Suspicious Levels of Creatinine in Saliva in Order to Detect and Prevent Kidney Diseases.”

“So, we are looking at bringing together students from as diversified areas as education to engineering to biomedical science so that they can collectively look at sustainability from their point of view and work on research projects that are multidisciplinary in nature,” Bhat said.

The program will provide LinkedIn Learning modules made by sustainability experts to improve the students’ leadership skills.

“They [will] learn about communication, how to be assertive in a business world, how to, you know, be passionate about their cause,” she said. “And to convey that as effectively as possible, to not only the college population or college campus community, but also to the outside community.”

After completing the one-year program, the nine students are expected to become ambassadors of sustainability and raise awareness in their community.

“Even if they leave the [Rio Grande] Valley, wherever they go, … they become champions for sustainability in the world,” Grewal said.

The Student Leadership Program is considered a pilot project, since it is the first time it has been launched.

“We are piloting this project with this core group of nine students … that make up this first cohort,” Bhat said. “And then we will look at this very closely going into the fall, and, perhaps, expand this leadership component to other special groups of students as well.”

Sustainability Fellows was created in Spring 2019 by Grewal.

The goal of the program is for these nine students to enhance sustainability at UTRGV and in the outside community, Grewal said.

Upon applying for graduate school, students can apply to be a Sustainability Fellow. After filling out the application form, students must write a statement of interest. The Office of Sustainability will evaluate each application and select the students who best fit the program.

“I just encourage students to learn about sustainability before they apply for the program,” he said.

Castellano, a graduate student and band director at Sharyland Pioneer High School, chose to combine his passion for music and sustainability for his project “From Seed to Harvest: The Pedagogical and Cognitive Development of Percussion Students from Beginner through University Graduate.”

“My project currently has to do with, kind of, figuring out systematic flaws, or issues, or areas, that we can improve within our local music departments or music areas, kind of, in general,” he said.

Asked how the Sustainability Student Leadership Program benefits the UTRGV community, Castellano replied, “This, directly, is very impactful because the type of influence that it will have on not only, you know, the person involved, like … us as fellows, but the ripples that it’ll create to affect our friends … people that are involved in other majors, other undergrads or graduate students … get them involved as well, as far as the ideology behind trying to help people … our environment and our community.”