More than $150,000 Grant Funds ECSU’s IMMERSE Program

More than $150,000 has been awarded to Elizabeth City State University for a program aimed at enhancing STEM skills in rising fifth and sixth grade school students.

The ECSU Office of Sponsored Programs announced that the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science in partnership with the Department of Emergency Management was awarded the Student STEM Enrichment Program (SSEP) Award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF). The SSEP awarded $152,210 to ECSU over the next three years.

The award will fund the IMMERSE (Innovating, Mentoring, and Managing Emergency Response through STEM Enrichment) program. The is focused on impacting rising fifth and sixth grade students by providing them career awareness and learning experiences focused on STEM skill development with a focus on Emergency Management.

The IMMERSE program will recruit 75 students over the next three years (25 students per year). The selected students will be required to attend multiple Saturday sessions during the academic year and participate in a nonresidential program for four weeks in the summers at ECSU.

Antonio Rook, who currently serves as MSEN Pre-College Program Director and Computer Science Faculty, is the lead Principal Investigator on this proposal. Dr. Kevin Kupietz and Dr. Peter Loebach, both Professors in the Department of Emergency Management, serve as Co-Principal Investigators. Mr. Rook and the project team will begin to recruit for IMMERSE in Spring 2019 so that they can begin the program in August 2019. 

Through the program students will enhance their STEM skills and emergency management knowledge and learn from professionals in these disciplines. The IMMERSE students will learn engineering concepts, problem solving, teamwork, graphic design, and technical applications while fostering STEM related career discussions with a focus on emergency management. 

The program will use state-of-the-art technologies utilized in careers in emergency management and public safety and work in the context of water rescue and response.STEM Faculty will concentrate on best practices, using hands-on, inquiry-based, activities and lab experiences in STEM to create opportunities for students to grow as learners, while exposing them to the burgeoning field of emergency management. 

IMMERSE will also include activities that incorporate self-discovery, entrepreneurship, cooperative learning, goal setting, career exploration, as well as academic and career advising.  Students will learn skills in written communication, problem solving, vocabulary development, decision making, financial literacy, grooming, and time management (study habits).