ALL-SPICE partners and collaborating projects

Funded by the Minority Business Development Administration, `Inana (hawaiian: spark) is about building capacity in inclusive sustainability entrepreneurship for Hawai’i and the Pacific region in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The program provides new curriculum in Sustainability Entrepreneurship, internships and incubator services for students who want to develop tech-based sustainability solutions. ($600K, 2022-24: PI Turner, PD Uehara).

The Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, in partnership with Clarkson Aerospace Corporation, funds a research, education and professional development program at Chaminade. The program integrates biophysics , toxicology and data science to examine the bioeffects of novel nano materials. ROTC, veteran and reserve students form across the state can complete a DataSkills upskilling program and research internships that apply their new skills. The program has supported 19 students to date and is enrolling a new cohort of 10 students in Fall 2023 ($250K, 2021-23; $500K, 2023-25; PI Turner).

The HHMI Inclusive Excellence 3 (IE3) initiative challenges U.S. colleges and universities to substantially and sustainably build their capacity for student belonging, especially for those who have been historically excluded from the sciences. Chaminade’s Ho`Imi IE program addresses inclusion and belonging for minoritized and marginalized Hawaii-Pacific students ($1M, 2018-24; PI Turner)

The Ho’oulu STEM Scholarship Program is funded by Kamehameha Schools and Chaminade University. Scholarship awards provide 100% tuition and are targeted at highly talented future STEM professionals with demonstrated financial need. Ho`oulu combines transformative financial support with culture-based STEM curriculum, inclusive pedagogy and a wraparound ‘Academic Navigator’ student support system. The program has served 199 Scholars, has a 95% retention rate and 100% of eligible students have graduated with >99 majors and 69 minors. Over 50% have entered graduate school , 85% are in STEM careers and >60% have remained in Hawaii. ($15.6M, 2016-26, PI Turner).

Chaminade houses two NSF-S-STEM Programs that support high talent, low income students who will be the STEM future of the Pacific basin. The Inana S-STEM program supports biology and environmental students to address key sustainability and climate change-related issues in the Pacific. The PEARL S-STEM (Pacific Excellence through Analytics Research and Learning) supports Data Science majors. The two programs collectively support > 50 students with scholarship and wraparound interventions modeled on the Ho’oulu culture-based STEM program at Chaminade. (Inana: $1M, 2018-24; PI Turner: PEARL. $1M, 2020-25; PI Turner, co-PIs Chong, Stokes)

The Student Training through Immersive Data Science Education (STRIDE) will fund 67 scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students. “The progressively more data-rich nature of biological sciences creates the need for enhanced professional preparation in data science to improve the competitiveness and employability of our graduates,” said UH Mānoa Provost Michael Bruno .“This is a tremendous opportunity to give our students invaluable skills to advance them in their future careers.” In addition to receiving tuition, selected students in the STRIDE program will benefit from professional development resources, including workshops and internships to build their resumes and develop career readiness skills. Majors include: biology/biological sciences, biochemistry, botany, biological engineering, microbiology, molecular biosciences and biotechnology, molecular cell biology, natural resources and environmental management, tropical plant sciences and zoology. ($1.5M, 2022-27; PI Stokes)

The Building Capacity in STEM Educational Research program is focused on the potential for social justice-oriented pedagogy to increase inclusion for minoritized and marginalized students in data science. JADD (Justice-oriented Approaches to Data science Education) surveys students’ knowledge, beliefs, skills and attitudes about JO-pedagogy and tests novel classroom interventions. ($330K, 2022-24, PI Stokes)

ChangeHI is a five-year $20M award from the National Science Foundation EPSCoR program to fund research, education and capacity building in support of actionable climate science. ChangeHI improves our understanding and builds resiliency to the impacts of climate change by incorporating climate science and data science tools in an unprecedented, multi-scale collaboration effort to promote climate-informed, data-driven discoveries. ($20M, 2022-27, PI Jacobs, co-PI Turner)

Following federal approval, Chaminade University launched an innovative “second chance” Pell Grant program in 2020 that gives Halawa Correctional Facility inmates an opportunity to earn an associate’s degree in Business Administration. Nine men will graduate in May 2023, the first cohort in the Program. ALL-SPICE is collaborating with Second Chance Pell on two initiatives: (1) Data Science Certifications and Data Physicalization projects with incarcerated men in the Program, and (2) providing paid internships in Data Analytics leading to professional certifications for men after release. (PI Davidson, ALL-SPICE lead Turner).

Coordinated by ALL-SPICE co-PI Stokes, this seminar series is building capacity for data science to empower organizational change for the largest Native Hawaiian Educational Trust. This contract with the Hawai Data Science Institute, Stokes coordinates (1) DatSkills training and professional development for cohorts of Kamehameha staff, and (2) the Kamehameha Schools Data Science Institute Seminar Series.

INBRE promotes the development, coordination, and sharing of research resources and expertise that will expand the research opportunities and increase the number of competitive investigators in the IDeA-eligible states.

The IOA Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation connects 11 two and four year colleges in Hawaii and the US-affiliated Pacific region. The IOA mission is to increase the number of underrepresented minority students—especially students of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander ancestry—graduating with two- and four-year degrees in STEM disciplines. (PI Irwin, co-PI Turner, 2018-24)

The National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Site: Cyberinfrastructure (CI) Research for Social Change is engaging 10 undergraduate students each summer for nine weeks in solving real-world problems of national relevance, teaching them to not only be critical thinkers, but to be creative and reflective, as well.

The ML-RCP enables collaborative research partnerships between AFRL and academia that engage a diverse pool of talent in addressing foundational research challenges in support of the nation's air, space, and cyberspace technology needs. At Chaminade the AFRL ML-RCP will fund faculty-student research into the bioeffects of environmental toxins, using toxicology , data analytics and machine learning. ($250K, 2023-25, PI Turner, co-PI Stokes).

The National Science Foundation has awarded a nearly $1-million grant to the University of Hawaiʻi Hawaiʻi Data Science Institute (HI-DSI) supporting cyberinfrastructure (CI) training for climate scientists and students in the Hawaiʻi-Pacific region. The three-year grant will help create workshop and curriculum models for undergraduate and graduate students to increase their cyberinfrastructure skills across the climate science domain. The project, titled “Cyberinfrastructure Training to Advance Climate Science” (CI-TRACS), will help build essential CI skills for the Hawaiʻi-Pacific workforce through 36 undergraduate and 12 graduate student training experiences and 10 new publicly available workshops to increase CI awareness and skills. ($4M, 2022-26, PI Jacobs, co-PI Turner, Education Lead Stokes)

This congressionally funded program led by Hawaii Defense Alliance is a statewide initiative to build capacity in data science and other critical skills for the security and intelligence community in Hawaii, connecting directly to DOD and defense sector employers. P3I at Chaminade will fund the development of two new certificate programs in Geospatial Intelligence, 12 summer placements/year in our NSF ALL-SPICE Summer Immersion, and 5 internships per year at the US Army Pacific Command. ($1.4M, 2023-26, PI Turner, Project Lead sSpeck, Brockway, Chong).

The new Bowie State University Influence Operations National Innovation Center (BIONIC) is designed to leverage research in artificial intelligence, publicly available information, and cognitive/human behavioral sciences to combat adverse misinformation campaigns. BIONIC will engage BSU student to help assess, analyze, and deploy the benefits of an integrated approach to detect, deter, and defeat dangerous malign/adversarial information campaigns that can threaten our national security. Chaminade and UH ALL-SPICE students participated in a Operation Red Dawn, a 20 hour micro-internship led by BIONIC, in April 2023. (Program liaison, Turner)

The University of Hawaiʻi (UH) System Center for Indigenous Innovation and Health Equity (CIIHE) aims to advance Indigenous innovation (the application of traditional Indigenous knowledge, practices, and methodologies to contemporary problems) as a tool for health equity in NHPI populations.

NIH’s AIM-AHEAD program will establish mutually beneficial and coordinated partnerships to increase the participation and representation of researchers and communities currently underrepresented in the development of AI/ML models and enhance the capabilities of this emerging technology, beginning with electronic health record (EHR) data. ALL_SPICE coPI Stokes leads to AIM-AHEAD programs: (1) Research pilot hub using data science andML to develop predictive tools for intersex status based on EHR; (2) HEART: a DataSkills instantiation providing data science training and research projects focused in health equity for Hawaii and Pacific Island-based students. ($500K, 2022-24, PI Stokes, Student mentor Flynn)

This $8M NIH Center located at the University of Hawaii was established in 2019. The focus on PIKO is on Pacific health equity: “PIKO is an unprecedented initiative in Hawai‘i to promote the development and facilitate the implementation of culturally responsive and community-engaged clinical and translational research aimed at improving the health and wellbeing of Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, Filipinos, and other medically underserved populations.” Keawe‘aimoku Kaholokula, PIKO PI.

ALL-SPICE Faculty Chong leads the PIKO Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Research and Data Science (BERD) Core for this statewide effort.. ALL-SPICE faculty Dr. Laura Tipton is a member of the BERD Core Group and Dr. Helen Turner serves on the internal advisory committee for the Center.