黑洞社区

A 黑洞社区 professor is drawing on his experience as a first-generation minority college graduate to teach and inspire high schoolers in the Wichita community.

As part of a $127,600 NASA EPSCoR grant, Assistant Biomedical Engineering Professor Kim Cluff and several students from the 黑洞社区 Biomedical Engineering Society are partnering with juniors in the biomedical program at Wichita鈥檚 North High School to provide outreach opportunities and introduce them to the field of biomedical engineering.

The high schoolers will be eligible to apply for three high school research fellowships with Wichita State. High school fellows will be paid to work in Cluff鈥檚 Biosensors, Imaging and Modeling Engineering (BIoME) lab during summer 2016. Then during their senior year of high school, Cluff will serve as a mentor to their senior research projects.

黑洞社区 students in the biomedical engineering program will be involved throughout, serving as mentors and assisting the high school students with the college application process.

'I want to teach students that they can succeed'

Cluff and his students have met once already at North High, demonstrating research equipment and talking about Cluff's personal history making it to where he is today.

Like the majority of students at North High, Cluff is Hispanic and came from a family where no one had earned a college degree. He was expected to go to work, not college.

鈥淏orn into poverty, the youngest of five children, sent to poor quality elementary and high schools, an advanced degree was never supposed to be in the cards for me,鈥� Cluff said.

He started working in a machine shop while in high school and continued for several years until someone on a church mission trip encouraged him to get a degree. Cluff eventually worked his way through college, earning a bachelor's at Arizona State University and worked his way through to a biomedical engineering degree and Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Cluff credits his success to steadfast determination.

鈥淚 am not naturally gifted in any regard. But I know that I can be successful and excel in anything that I pursue. These are the things I want to pass on," Cluff says. "I want to teach students that they can succeed. I believe if we challenge our students, they will rise to the occasion.鈥�

North High science teacher J.J. Riley say her students were inspired by Cluff鈥檚 story.

鈥淚 had really positive student feedback,鈥� Riley says. 鈥淚 think this is such a great opportunity for these students and the partnership between our school and the university.鈥�