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Khalida grew up in Los Alamos, N.M., and entered the military after completing high school. She stayed there for 12 years while learning Arabic and later competing as part of the US Army parachute team. Eventually, she decided to give up her active-duty military career to study theoretical high-energy physics.

This led to her enrollment at NC State. During her undergraduate career, she has worked alongside professor Chueng Ji in high-energy physics, completed two summer internships at Fermilab and Jefferson Lab, finished the Physics Honors Program, been inducted to Phi Beta Kappa, and continued working as a non-commissioned officer in the Army Reserve.

Outside of physics, she went to the World Championship in Parachute Accuracy in 2010 with the USA Skydiving team and is a proud owner of three purebred beagles that she actively presents at dog shows. She still skydives at the occasional football game with the All Veteran Parachute Team. Upon graduation, she will be joining the physics department at Ohio State University and plans to pursue a doctorate in theoretical high-energy physics.

It’s what they do, whether they’re making new tools for detecting radiation or building companies to support cancer research.

But not every NC State student debuts his or her creations to an audience of adoring peers and potential business partners. That’s the experience at Art2Wear, the annual show of fashions from students in the College of Design and the College of Textiles. Part of NC State Fashion Week, Art2Wear showcased 10 student designers’ work on April 25.

The show gave students rare exposure, said runway show director Lauren Caddick, a junior art and design major.

“They really do get their name out there as an emerging designer in front of industry professionals who attend the show,” she said. “It’s an experience to see what it’s actually like in the real world to design for a large-scale event.”

The theme for Art2Wear 2013 was Hypernatural. Designers focused on amplifying and manipulating elements of nature in conceiving their collections. The results included collections based on celestial objects, camouflage and concealment, fractals and naturally occurring patterns, and materials found in dumpsters.

“It’s the idea of taking something that’s found in nature … and augmenting some part of it to make some big extravagant idea,” said Caddick, who is a Park Scholar.

After four years in Reynolds Coliseum, Art2Wear returned to the Court of North Carolina this year. New faculty advisors Katherine Diuguid and Justin LeBlanc saw the move outdoors as a way of refreshing the event. The outdoor venue was only the most visible change for Art2Wear. Diuguid and LeBlanc took over as advisors this year after the retirement of longtime advisor Vita Plume in 2012.

“Both of us remember the excitement of it being outside and how utterly beautiful it was,” Diuguid said. She and LeBlanc, now assistant professors of art and design, both designed collections for Art2Wear as undergraduates.

Open video in YouTube | Transcript | Video from NC State YouTube

Organizers also opened the event up a bit this year, welcoming students from other colleges to participate. Nick Szerszen, a senior studying business in the Poole College of Management, was the fundraising chair. A new fundraiser event preceded Art2Wear: Stomp The Heels, a January race where runners sprang down Hillsborough Street in high heels. Winners received tickets to the men’s home basketball game against UNC-Chapel Hill. Some of the race proceeds went to Arts for Life, a nonprofit organization that helps children with serious illness express themselves through art.

“It comes to a point when you realize you can be more than just a fashion show and more than just something exciting,” Caddick said. “You can actually do something that gives back.”

NC State has received an INSPIRE grant from the National Science Foundation to better understand how plants will respond to various stresses, such as a lack of essential nutrients. In particular, the project investigates how a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana responds when deprived of iron, which is essential to the plant’s biological processes. However, a more significant goal of the project is to improve our understanding of the specific proteins (or “transcription factors”) that control how the plant responds to environmental conditions.

“That information will be used to create computer models that can give us insight into how plants respond to various stresses,” says Cranos Williams, the lead investigator on the project and an assistant professor of computer engineering. “Ultimately, we want to create models that can help us determine the best practices for breeding plants with increased nutritional value and the best agricultural practices for different conditions – ranging from how growers should respond to stresses related to climate change or new plant diseases to farming on marginal crop land.”

Williams’ work focuses on using computational models to understand the behavior of complex biological systems. And project collaborator Joel Ducoste, a professor of environmental engineering, has experience in creating models of cellular processes. That’s the kind of know-how you need to develop mathematical and computer models that can predict how plants will respond to various stresses – but that’s not all you need. For instance, you also need someone who understands the plants themselves.

Enter Terri Long, an assistant professor of plant biology who uses genomics, molecular biology and genetics to determine how the activity of specific genes triggers physiological changes in plants. When certain genes are “switched on” they produce transcription factors that can then “switch on” other genes, triggering a range of behaviors in the plant. Long is already working to determine which of these transcription factors are triggered when Arabidopsis is deprived of iron, and how these various groups of genes interact with each other. All of that information will go into the creation of a prototype model – which Williams and Ducoste can test by comparing model predictions to the results that Long is seeing in her biology lab.

But running complex models like this one can take a long time, requiring a significant amount of computing power. This is where James Tuck comes in. An assistant professor of computer engineering, Tuck is working with the team to help streamline the model’s computation in order to make it run more quickly and efficiently.

“Without modifications, the model could take weeks or years to run, making the resulting calculations effectively useless,” said Tuck. “It’s like the problem of weather prediction—if the calculation takes so long that the storm hits before the prediction is made, it’s not useful.” Efficient implementations that leverage hundreds to thousands of computers are projected to solve large models in minutes or days, and that means finding answers quicker and more efficiently.

By sharing expertise in computer modeling, plant biology, genetics, biological systems and high-speed computing, the researchers hope to shed light on issues related to the most fundamental of real-world problems: ensuring that the human population has enough to eat.

And this is only a taste of things to come. Through the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program, NC State is planning to apply this sort of interdisciplinary approach to a range of additional research areas, from medicine to forensic science.

Learn more about how the innovators and innovations of tomorrow are being shaped today at NC State.

It’s a place where everything from the lighting to the architecture inspires people to explore and excel. The Hunt Library puts immersive, high-tech tools in the hands of students and faculty, enabling to them bring their ideas to life.

Learn more about the library of the future.

Mark Delgado, a senior at NC State who is majoring in nuclear engineering, has invented a wireless radiation detector that can be used with wireless devices such as Android smartphones. Called the Koyr Geiger, the device is no bigger than a smartphone itself.

The device could be used in nuclear energy and medical facilities to monitor radiation levels and transmit those measurements directly to a facility’s computer system, giving the facility real-time radiation safety data. “It could be used for advanced area monitoring, where the detector is stationary – or it could be part of a constantly moving network of monitors, with detectors clipped to the belts of employees,” Delgado says.

In addition, because the Koyr device uses a mobile platform, it could also be used to create a much larger radiation monitoring network, with detectors reporting data to a central computer. “For example, if detectors were mounted on police cars, and there was a dirty bomb incident, the server could use the GPS capability of the mobile platforms and the real-time radiation measurements to quickly zero in on the source of the radiation,” Delgado says.

Delgado began developing the concept of the Koyr Geiger in his Wood Hall dorm room at NC State. As a sophomore nuclear engineering student, Delgado says he was inspired by the discovery that “radiation detection technology hasn’t really changed much since the 1960s.” During his junior year, Delgado was confident enough in his new technology to launch Koyr Inc.

“We debuted a prototype for the Koyr Geiger and its mobile networking capability at the 2012 conference of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management,” Delgado says. “We got a lot of positive reviews, and our first customer – a national lab.”

Delgado credits NC State’s Entrepreneurship Initiative and Office of Technology Transfer with helping him turn his invention into a viable business opportunity. “Once the idea outgrew my dorm room, the Entrepreneurs Initiative at NC State provided me with the scientific instruments and work space I needed to develop the concept – as well as networking and mentorship opportunities that helped me kickstart this venture.”

Delgado and his device are competing in Startup Madness, a competition involving entrepreneurs from 14 universities.