“We felt especially lucky to have Drs. Anne and Brady Deaton join us and welcome all of our new members for this semester. We started off the event with a fun icebreaker scavenger hunt to get acquainted with each other, the Student Advisory Board, and our leaders from both DSP and the Deaton Institute. Our director of DSP, Jessica Osaze, gave us an opening word and introduced the SAB members and chairs. After the welcoming, everyone got to enjoy a meal catered by Nourish Cafe and begin preparing for their Innovation Challenge activity. We got to then hear Dr. Brady Deaton give us a short testimonial about his professional experience and the important work of the Deaton Scholars Program and the Deaton Institute. Dr. Anne Deaton closed us out with some words of encouragement, ending with the quote “if you’re not on fire with your passions, you’re burnt out.”

Event #2

Event #2 featured Dr. Kiruba Krishnaswamy of FEaST Lab at the University of Missouri. Dr. Krishnaswamy teaches our affiliated Zero Hunger Challenge course and is a professor in CAFNR and the College of Engineering. Read on for a reflection from Scholar Advisory Board member, Kellen Robertson.

“We had Dr. Krishnaswamy come to speak with us and inspire our personal discovery by addressing the power of transdisciplinary teams to address zero hunger. All of the Deaton Scholars were engaged and eager to ask Dr. Krishnaswamy questions about her professional experience and her advice for them as they start their project proposal ideas. To keep that momentum, we then had a past DSP panel with Lucy McGowan and Blessing Okafor. They discussed their experience with DSP and how it helped shape their professional and personal goals. They answered questions about the obstacles that some teams run into when collaborating on project proposals and their advice to take advantage of every opportunity DSP provides. We ended the session by breaking the students up into their teams for the semester to start brainstorming and planning how they would communicate the rest of the semester. Everyone left motivated and ready to dive into their projects.”