Office of External Communications

Houston, TX 77204-5017 Fax: 713.743.8199

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 27, 2004

Contact: Lisa Merkl
713.743.8192 (office)
713.605.1757 (pager)

A new generation of scientists, engineers and mathematicians will converge on campus as the University of Houston hosts the Fourth Annual Houston-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation Conference
October 1-3.

As part of a national NSF-sponsored program to help more minorities earn degrees in science, technology, mathematics and engineering (STEM) disciplines, as well as prepare them for graduate study, the Houston-area consortium, also known as H-LSAMP, is led by UH and includes seven other academic institutions of higher education. A national program, LSAMP seeks to build productive capacity and output within institutions with significant enrollments of minority populations of Hispanic, African-American, Native American and Pacific Islander descent underrepresented within STEM professions.

Others in the H-LSAMP consortium include Texas Southern University, UH-Downtown, UH-Victoria, Rice University, Texas State University, Houston Community College System and San Jacinto College District. The group also enjoys a good partnership with Houston Independent School District, heavily recruiting eligible students to attend institutions in the alliance.

Put on by H-LSAMP, the conference is open to anyone who wants to register and attend, including LSAMP members from around the nation. There will be workshops for various graduate and undergraduate programs, GRE classes, exhibitors recruiting students and poster and oral presentations for prizes.

Student presenters at this year’s conference will include past H-LSAMP scholars who have gone on to become medical students, practicing engineers, high school science teachers, computer programmers and middle school counselors, as well as those embarking on the pursuit of graduate degrees that range from applied mathematics to political social work.

Conference speakers are Jaime Borras, vice president and technology director for Motorola’s iDEN Subscriber Group; Guadalupe Quintanilla, president of the Cross-Cultural Communication Center of Houston and associate professor in the UH modern and classical languages department; and Richard A. Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University.

Borras has made significant contributions in science, engineering and technology by leading the development of new breakthrough products and technologies that ultimately became the key elements of success for Motorola. Quintanilla’s cross-cultural communication program developed for officers has been selected by the Department of Defense and Department of Justice as the best of its type in the country. Tapia, an internationally known researcher in computational and mathematical sciences, led Rice to national prominence for its educational outreach programs and leadership in producing women and underrepresented minority doctoral recipients in mathematical sciences.

For more information about H-LSAMP, visit www.hlsamp.uh.edu.

To receive UH science news via e-mail, visit www.uh.edu/admin/media/sciencelist.html.

For more information about UH visit the university’s ‘Newsroom’ at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.