Hoover High at Center of Iowa’s STEM Universe
Emiliano Mroue, winner of the 2014 World Food Prize Young Entrepreneur aware, speaks to Hoover High School students.
The beat goes on this week at Hoover, the high school that’s gaining quite a reputation as a Petri dish for student STEM cells.
Tuesday night the school was the site of talks by two high-profile guests in town for the annual World Food Prize festival, one of them a Hoover grad, who launched a Distinguished Lecture Series.
Then Wednesday morning, Hoover’s STEM Academy strutted its stuff before representatives of the Iowa STEM Advisory Council who are weighing the program’s application for a grant that would supplement the one Hoover has already received.
Emiliano Mroue, an Argentinian, received the 2014 World Food Prize Young Entrepreneur award for his work in West Africa with subsistence rice farmers.
Ken Culver, Hoover Class of 1978, is a founding director of the Foundation for Peace. He is a physician trained in pediatrics and allergy-immunology. Currently he is a Senior Medical Director at Novartis Oncology (East Hanover, NJ). He previously worked at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland on genetic research. Since 1989, he’s led more than 30 trips to the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Kenya.
Each spoke last night from very personal perspectives about the global issues of food scarcity, security and distribution.
Mroue and Culver followed up on their formal lectures Tuesday evening by meeting with some 200 students who are enrolled in the Hoover STEM Academy on Wednesday morning. Then 10 lucky students were off to the Iowa Youth Hunger Summit luncheon with the governor and several dignitaries from the WFP organization.
So much is going on it’s hard to know where to start. But the presentations by Hoover STEM students to the STEM Advisory Council’s Site Committee first thing Wednesday deserve particular attention.
In 2013 Hoover was one of four schools selected to receive the first batch of state STEM grants. That money was used to design a space conducive to the sorts of collaboration and brainstorming that are vital to scientific research. It became the headquarters of an original academy cohort of 52 self-described guinea pigs, fittingly, who are now seniors. A panel selected from that group met with the grant site reps this morning in that very space to report on what they’ve been up to and how the opportunities they’ve been afforded promise to impact their futures.
Academy director Maureen Griffin provided the visitors with homemade pumpkin bars concocted with her secret formula. She and Eric Hall and the rest of the Hoover STEM staff are seeking a STEM BEST grant to enable more career counseling for students, more professional development for teachers and funding for logistical stuff like transportation to summer camps on college campuses. But what really wowed their guests, just as Griffin and Hall planned, were the student testimonials.
Jonathan Le will represent the state of Iowa as its delegate to this weekend’s Global Youth Institute in connection with the WFP where he’ll defend his research paper on water quality in Viet Nam, the homeland his parents fled in the 1970s as child refugees in the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia. Le flies in the face of the stereotype of the bookish brainiac. He laughed as he recounted his earlier interest in paleontology, as though recalling a childish attraction to cartoons. His listeners got a kick out of his recollections, too.
Leilla Memisevic, Diana Rodriguez and Nejla Memic talked about their summer experiences in STEM programs at Iowa State University and research they’re currently working on at Grand View University. Their speech is sprinkled with words like “diatoms” and “nitrates” instead of “like” and “um.”
While Le got the audience to chuckle the lone junior in the group, Lal Zual, brought tears to the eyes of some, including Griffin, when she retraced her own improbable journey by way of thanking everyone she could think of for the opportunities she now enjoys.
She came here from Malaysia at the age of 12, not having been able to attend school from the ages of 9-11. The only English she knew was “hello.” By the time she entered high school Lal had graduated from ELL instruction to mainstream classes. Griffin encouraged her to tackle AP Chemistry. She struggled, telling Griffin at one point she couldn’t do it. Griffin insisted she could. Things got better, so much so that she decided at some point to become a doctor.
“I thought I could be the one to treat patients,” she told the evaluators. “Now I think maybe I can be the one to develop the medicines instead of just being the one to give them to people who are sick. And maybe they,” she added, nodding at her classmates, “will be the ones to do great things in engineering. Thanks to all of you guys for giving us the chance.”
She’s come a long way in a few short years. The same goes for the school she now calls home.
