Nearly five years ago, university students across the country were abruptly sent home when COVID-19 cases emerged in the continental United States and quickly spread across the country.

It was a tense and frightening moment. The virus that causes the illness is highly contagious, and there was no vaccine. The national death toll rose quickly and without mercy, claiming 385,000 lives in the United States that year alone.

Despite daunting numbers and with vaccines still early in development, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University students and their counterparts nationwide returned to transformed campuses in Fall 2020, masked up, washed up and keeping six feet between themselves in lines and in classrooms.

In my former role as the U.S. Steel Dean of the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering, I co-led that university's COVID response alongside our provost, giving my risk engineering background a good workout. As challenging as COVID was, I recognized it as a time of incredible innovation. We had a strong unity of purpose and solved difficult problems with technology and new tools.

North Carolina A&T's response was every bit as strong, as I have heard many times since joining A&T last summer. Our students and employees carefully observed COVID protocols month after month. When vaccinations became available, they got their shots. If they got sick, they quarantined in a residence hall set aside for that purpose, well served by university staff, or went home to quarantine there.

Within its response, A&T was doing everything that an innovative, highly efficient and effective exponential organization does. It established clear lines of communication, employed new ways of looking at wastewater data (the veritable canary in the coal mine for tracking COVID) and came up with creative responses to challenges like effective quarantining and mounting aggressive responses to areas that seemed prone to outbreaks.

 "In between now and whatever H5N1 sends our way, we have the opportunity to review recent history and prepare for the potential of another health crisis to the best of our ability."

At A&T’s Alvin Blount Student Health Center, its innovations around monitoring wastewater tests were so successful, they were adapted by Harvard and countless other campuses. In sum, A&T’s comprehensive, widely emulated approach not only helped it maintain lower infection and illness rates than most other schools, but made it unnecessary to send students back home to quell campus outbreaks for the duration of the pandemic. News media, including National Public Radio and the Washington Post, took notice of our success and what accounted for it.

Even so, as one of our esteemed alumni, Willie A. Deese, pointed out, the medical response to COVID across the country and around the world required next-level innovation. Writing in the Charlotte Observer in the fall of 2020, Deese - formerly the global manufacturing president of Merck and Company pharmaceuticals - said the novel vaccine development process using the new MRA platform "would require that it works exactly as it should and that there are no stumbles along the way – the pharmaceutical equivalent of 'running the table' in pool." The scientific work was flawless, and two months later, the Food and Drug Agency granted emergency use authorization for vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. By April 2021, all U.S. adults became eligible for the shots.

The lessons learned from a pandemic that killed more than 7 million people globally have become part of the culture at our exponential university. COVID lessons may soon take on an added value. In January, a 65-year-old Louisiana man became the first person in the United States to die from H5N1, the virus commonly known as bird flu. H5N1 variants are now spreading rapidly in dairy cattle, poultry, other birds and rats. So far, 70 Americans have now been diagnosed with the virus. At this early stage, as with COVID, there is no vaccine.

As someone who has spent most of my career studying how well infrastructure holds up and how effectively individuals and communities respond to crises, I can attest that each such episode is unique, with its own set of circumstances and dynamics. But our ability to endure under the stresses those episodes bring depends largely on how well we understand and apply the lessons of previous crises.

Collectively, we snapped back from COVID so quickly that many institutions didn't adequately commit its lessons to institutional memory. How many college campuses are applying them now in preparation for what could be a significant public health challenge? Are our health centers stocked with preventive gear? Are our facilities departments ready to implement protective measures that worked to our advantage four years ago? Are our communications teams prepared to ensure facts and direction displace fear and speculation? 

We may soon find out. COVID gave us a common sense of purpose in higher education that we somehow lost as things returned to normal. In between now and whatever H5N1 sends our way, we have the opportunity to review recent history, prepare for the potential of another health crisis to the best of our ability and perhaps align with a new purpose as effectively as we did in 2020-2021.

Let’s be sure we’re ready for the test. 

James R. Martin II, Ph.D., M. ASCE, is chancellor of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

Once upon a time, it was children who should be “seen and not heard.” But at the North Carolina A&T College of Engineering’s Center for Composite Materials Research, it’s jet engines, military aircraft and rockets that are getting the silent treatment.

Researchers from the center recently announced their creation of a high-tech acoustic liner for the exhaust section of those ultra-loud engines, which can reach 150 decibels and be heard 15 miles away. The lightweight liner, which maintained structural integrity at temperatures of 700 degrees Fahrenheit in testing, is a major advance in acoustic science and technology.

“No successful technology exists for these temperatures,” “said center Director Kunigal Shivakumar, Ph.D. “This revolutionary technology could pave the way for even higher-performing acoustic liners, potentially extending their use in a wide range of aerospace applications, from commercial jetliners to military aircraft.”

Shivakumar’s research team first envisioned the liner in 2009 and shared early material from their work with national labs, but further development ran into snags. Eight years later, the work got a burst of new life when graduate student Bharath Kenchappa joined the A&T doctoral program in Mechanical Engineering, and took on validation of the liner's concept, design and analysis as the focus of his Ph.D., which he completed in 2022.

As the work progressed, center researchers tested the liner in the NASA Glenn Research Center’s Aero-Acoustic Propulsion Laboratory. The team is now pursuing a patent for the innovation, which researchers believe could lead not only to quieter engines but to the industry-wide goal of reducing environmental noise pollution.

Read more at https://www.ncat.edu/news/2024/12/researchers-reduce-aircraft-engine-noise.php.

When philanthropist MacKenzie Scott famously donated $45 million to North Carolina A&T in 2020, university leaders took a portion of those funds to create a new, full-ride, four-year scholarship to attract more of the best and brightest students to the university.

The February One Scholars Program - named for the date in 1960 that four A&T freshmen mounted a sit-in in downtown Greensboro that electrified the civil rights movement across the country - now boasts 60 scholars after four consecutive fall terms of filling all new slots in the program. This academic year's entering class boasted a collective average GPA of 4.3, exceptional leadership and character qualities and strong commitments to service.

"February One Scholars are students who are dedicated to transforming our society," said Margaret I. Kanipes, Ph.D., dean of the A&T Honors College. "These students possess unique talents and ideas that will empower and revolutionize our world." 

The February One program is organized around three academic units: the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, the College of Education and the College of Science and Technology. Scholars are not only immersed in an outstanding educational experience, conducive to in-depth and engaged learning, they are empowered to grow and develop professionally and influence the world for the better through personal action.

The program's first graduates will be featured in spring commencement ceremonies two months from now.

Read more at https://www.ncat.edu/news/2025/01/fourth-feb-one-scholars.php.