Graduate research stories

Read about the Mustangs making a difference in their fields.

Finding new ways to prevent food waste

Enabled by a graduate assistantship, Khengdauliu Chawang ’24 has developed a small, disposable pH detector to monitor food spoilage in real time. Creating the device was personal for Chawang, a Lyle School of Engineering Ph.D. candidate from Nagaland, a remote region in India that relies heavily on agricultural crops. “Food waste in Nagaland means undernourished children and extra fieldwork for the elderly to compensate for the loss,” Chawang said. “The need to prevent food waste motivated me to think of a device that is not expensive or labor-intensive to develop, is disposable and can detect freshness levels.”

One teacher at a time

Students like Mary Cabanas Cardenas ’23 can relieve the impact of widespread teacher resignations. Cabanas, who has planned to teach since eighth grade, will enter the tough profession with her eyes wide open, thanks to SMU’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development. Cabanas is the recipient of the Noyce Teacher Scholarship, which commits her to teach math at a high-need school after graduation. The Noyce Scholarship has also opened doors through mentorship by faculty sponsors. On Saturday mornings, Cabanas can be found on campus assisting in an education research project comparing the effectiveness of using iPads vs. virtual reality to teach geometry. She also spent a summer researching best practices in math education by watching videos of math teachers and coding their teaching practices. In addition, Cabanas helped analyze the effectiveness of demonstrating to students how workers use math in their careers. “I’ll take what I’ve learned from research into my classroom,” Cabanas said.