“Extreme events impact several principal components of how we live. They impact food, energy, water, and health,” Dr. Fares explains. “Imagine energy is used to pump water to distribute it. And also water is needed for drinking… So if energy fails, then the water pumps fail, and we will not be able to get water,
"The following leaders sit at the center of that reckoning. Whether steering universities through heightened state oversight, advocating for Black educators amid systemic upheaval, or governing the state-controlled Houston ISD, each will be closely watched in 2026."
Prairie View A&M University’s proud legacy of producing leaders is a beacon. It drew Torina Lewis, PhD, from Rhode Island to Texas in January 2024 to advance science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) through community engagement and multidisciplinary innovation. Now, she is the director of the Science Innovation Demonstration Laboratory and an endowed professor
Prairie View A&M University’s Google Endowed Professor Judy Perkins, PhD, PE, still uses a book her sister gave her as a child when encouraging students to pursue engineering: “Can I Be an Engineer?” That early gift, along with the support of her mother and mentors, laid the foundation for a lifelong career in transportation engineering
As a young intern at a juvenile facility in Florida, Camille Gibson noticed something deeply troubling: despite having rehearsed test answers with the boys she tutored, many weren’t even attempting to complete their written exams. The reason? They couldn’t read. “Some of them were in 12th grade, about to graduate. What happened?” Those early
For Prairie View A&M University Brown Endowed Chair of Architecture Bill Price, architecture is where people and nature meet. “As an architectural researcher, I see architecture as the nexus between the known and the unknown,” he said. “This interdisciplinary field allows me to investigate the relationship between nature and the built environment.” Growing up
Long before ChatGPT, there was AlexNet – the deep-learning solution named after its creator, Alex Krizhevsky. It won the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2012 and ensnared Lijun Qian, Ph.D., sparking his interest in the emerging field. Now, Dr. Qian is the AT&T endowed professor of electrical and computer engineering at Prairie View
The rains decided the fates of farmers in the small rural village in India where Prairie View A&M University’s Honeywell Endowed Professor Raghava Kommalapati, Ph.D., PE, BCEE, F. ASCE, grew up. As a young boy in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh in India, where farming was the main livelihood, Dr. Kommalapati saw firsthand
As an Endowed Professor of Political Science at Prairie View A&M University, Melanye Price ‘95, Ph.D., still remembers walking to Sunnyside Park in Houston with her mom as a child to watch her vote. She and her twin sister would get to go into the booth and even pull the little lever. “I was
Fred A. Bonner II, Ed.D., endowed chair in educational leadership in the Whitlowe R. Green College of Education at Prairie View A&M University, knows his success story as a Black man in America is a rare one. So, the Jefferson, Texas native published “Academically Gifted African American Male College Students” to chronicle his journey.