Synergetic Education And Research In Enabling Nasa Centered Academic Development Of Engineers And Space Scientists

California State University (CSULA), Pasadena City College (PCC), both designated as Minority Serving Institutes (MSIs), and University of Southern California (USC), a prestige Ph.D. granting institution, have established partnerships in engineering education and multidisciplinary researches. The main activities of the partnership program have been conducted in the Synergetic Education and Research in Enabling NASA-Centered Academic Development of Engineers and Space-scientists (SERENADES) Laboratory 1 sponsored from 2004 to 2007 under the NASA’s Minority University and College Education and Research Partnership Initiative (MUCERPI). One of the primary objectives is to use the excitement of NASA’s mission and the MUCERPI program to inspire more minority/underrepresented students to pursue education and research, and ultimately to choose careers in the areas of electrical, computer, or astronomical engineering. During the entire funding period, the SERENADES Laboratory endeavored to the preparation of students from three cohorts to go through an educational pipeline. Students participating in the program were required to take a series of training classes in image processing techniques, realtime systems, and basic control engineering. Associatively, they were required to take the workshops so the students could leverage the learning experiences to applications related to NASA’s missions. More than forty students have benefited from the activities. Among the SERENADES graduates, all of them have been either hired by the CSULA SPACE Center a NASA University Research Center (URC), the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, local aerospace industry, or admitted to the graduate schools for master, and/or Ph.D. studies. Collaborative research efforts have been made among the investigators, student research assistants, and in-service teachers in the areas of James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) real-time system design, image processing, astronomical instrumentation, and astrophysical studies. As an outcome, more than 15 papers have been published, and more than 35 presentations have been given in technical conferences and outreach / open house events cumulatively. The SERENADE students have received awards in the engineering societies. The participating in-service teachers have delivered their research outcomes and the instructional software tools to the curricula of astronomy and physics in the local school districts. The SERENADES Laboratory also sponsors the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) Escalera Project which allows Hispanic students from a local High School district to participate in the SERENADES researches in summers. In addition, three senior/graduate level courses have been developed to leverage the research results of real-time and embedded systems, and image processing from the SERENADES laboratory to the electrical engineering curriculum at CSULA.