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.

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.

Kunduru came to NC State in 2009 as a Ph.D. student in biomedical engineering, drawn by the prospect of applying her electrical engineering background to complex biological and medical problems. But in 2011, she took an entrepreneurship course, where she learned about a new vaccine developed by NC State researchers Hosni Hassan and Matthew Koci that targeted Salmonella.

“I’d had a bad experience with foodborne illness while in grad school in Oregon,” Kunduru says, “so I was very interested in any efforts to tackle foodborne pathogens.”

As part of the entrepreneurship class, Kunduru assessed the business potential of the vaccine, and found it promising. The vaccine had already been patented, and Kunduru worked with a team of her classmates to develop a business plan for what would eventually become Enteric Vaccine Solutions (EVS).

EVS was launched in January 2012, with the initial goal of marketing the Salmonella vaccine to the poultry industry. In laboratory testing, supported in part by NC State’s Chancellor’s Innovation Fund, Hassan and Koci were able to demonstrate the effectiveness of the vaccine in mice and chickens. EVS is part of the 2013 class of the Fast 15, a group of startup companies launched on work done at NC State.

“We’re now seeking funding to perform large-scale clinical trials, so that we can get USDA approval for the poultry industry to use the vaccine,” Kunduru says. “Then we can partner with an established pharmaceutical firm to mass-produce the vaccine and bring it to market.

“Our goal is for EVS to focus on research and the development of vaccines for a variety of pathogens – including, ultimately, Salmonella and Shigella vaccines for humans and E. coli vaccines for swine and cattle. Once we’ve developed and tested those vaccines, we’ll work with industry partners to produce and disseminate them on a large scale.”

But even as Kunduru is envisioning the future of EVS, she is also working to complete her Ph.D. in 2013.

“It’s extremely difficult to balance my work as an entrepreneur with my work as a student, but it’s also exciting,” Kunduru says. “That’s what keeps me going.”

They had to be at least 14 years old. They had to provide evidence of good moral character and physical development. They had to show competence in reading and writing English, as well as a familiarity with simple arithmetic, geography and North Carolina history.

Such were the requirements that the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (A&M) set forth in 1889 for students to be accepted. Fifty-one young men from North Carolina showed up that October for the first weeks of class. During that first academic year, the class grew to 72, who each paid $20 in annual tuition, $8 a month for board, 75 cents a month for laundry services and $12.50 a year for books, stationery, fuel, lights and medical care.

Some members of the first class were the sons of merchants and farmers. Others were sons of Confederate soldiers. A few were first-generation Americans, born to immigrants from Germany and Scotland. Some, like Samuel Johnston Hinsdale, the 14-year old son of a Raleigh lawyer, were young teenagers whose matriculation would give them an education and an exodus out of adolescence. Others were already young men, like 23-year-old Clarence Bender Foy, who arrived after working on his father’s farm in Jones County.

Members of NC State's first freshman class stand on the steps of Holladay Hall.

In an iconic photo believed to be the first image of that first class of students, 40 of them and an instructor stand on the steps of what is now Holladay Hall. Their faces stare seriously at the camera. All are dressed like they’re on their way to an important business deal, some swallowed by suits too large for their teenage frames. A few sport heavy mustaches; others’ smooth babyfaces reflect their owners’ green youth. A number of the young men pose with the formal manner of a military officer, with a hand resting on their chests or their classmates’ shoulders, perhaps signaling a feeling of brotherhood that had already begun forming.

Of that first class, 19 called Wake County home. Others came from as far west as Buncombe County and as far east as Onslow County. Stephen Anthony LaCoste, a 17-year-old from Lynchburg, S.C., was the only student from outside North Carolina. Despite their varying origins, what united them was their willingness to gamble on the still-evolving commodity of land-grant education, set into motion by the 1862 passage of the Morrill Act. They took a chance on a campus composed of 66 acres, one building, one outhouse, a well and an old mule.

A popular saying often uttered by antagonists of the college was, “I wouldn’t be an agricultural man for he isn’t worth a damn,” writes David A. Lockmiller in his History of The North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering of the University of North Carolina 1889–1939 . That echoed other sentiments thrown at A&M, like “Cow College.” That was, in large part, due to courses that were set up for students to study an agriculture or mechanics track, which they started pursuing their sophomore year. The school year was divided into fall, winter and spring terms. Agriculture students studied horticulture, arboriculture, botany, history, English and bookkeeping, and had to perform manual labor that served as a practical application of their discipline. By 1893, the curriculum grew to include more complex classes, like general geology and paleontology, road-making and horticultural construction, and commercial floriculture. The mechanics curriculum included math, chemistry, history, English and bookkeeping, but came to include the study of steam machinery, surveying and the study of bridges and roofs.

Walter Jerome Mathews, a member of the first freshman class.

“We would go to class at 9:00 a.m. and would usually get out about 2:00 or 3:00 p.m.,” said Walter Jerome Mathews in a 1966 Alumni Association archived interview. Afterward, “if we would get any farm work to do then we would get a job and earn some money.” Mathews said the men could make 25 to 50 cents an hour. Or they could make seven cents an hour working odd jobs around the campus, like ringing a bell every hour to keep track of time. They could spend time in the first library, which held 1,500 volumes donated by the faculty and friends of the college. Or they could join the Pullen or Leazar literary societies on campus and attend weekly meetings with the Young Men’s Christian Association.

When time came for A&M’s first class to graduate in 1893, it was a three-day affair. It signaled the end of college life for 19 of the young men who had been a part of that first 72, most of whom didn’t finish college. On the first day, June 9, several seniors delivered orations at the college chapel. Henry Emil Bonitz, who went on to be one of the first native North Carolinians licensed to practice architecture in the state, delivered a speech called “Cranks and Fools,” in which he aligned cranks with science and indicted fools for being useless. Mathews told his classmates they should aspire to be noble men and to carry out the work of God.

Mathews, at his 1893 graduation.

Three days later, on June 12, Rev. Henry W. Battle delivered a baccalaureate address. Finally, on June 14, the graduation ceremony took place. More seniors were chosen to read their essays based on their academic standing. Robert Wilson Allen had started college four years earlier as a 20-year-old studying mechanics. At his commencement, he stood as senior class president, reading his essay “Science and Character.” Charles Duffy Francks, the top student studying mechanics, read his essay “The Rising Motive Power.” President Alexander Holladay read the honor roll. The seniors then received their degrees as their names were announced with their thesis topics. [See list of topics, p. 24.] Commencement ended that night off campus in downtown’s Metropolitan Hall with Henry Watterson, a Kentucky journalist who founded The Courier Journal of Louisville, delivering an address on America’s greatness and the morality of its people.

After these men left A&M, they pursued diverse career paths. Some became bankers and headed to law school. Others worked as engineers and machinists. Some became esteemed researchers in varying fields of study. Some returned to farms and had large families. And one became a shoe salesman.

Charles Burgess Williams was the man of firsts in the first class. Born in Camden County, he came to A&M at the age of 17 to study agriculture and chemistry. He was captain of the college’s first football team and graduated first in the Class of 1893, with an average of 89.3. The college later hired him as its first chemistry instructor and the first head of the Department of Agronomy. In 1917, he became the first dean of agriculture, a position he held for seven years. In 1953, six years after his death from a heart attack, Williams Hall was dedicated in his honor. “NC State was his life, really,” says Margie Lucas ’82 ms , Williams’ granddaughter and the third in a five-generation Wolfpack family. “That was passed on to us by osmosis. NC State was very important to the whole family.”

Williams’ legacy transcended his alma mater’s campus. His contributions in the field of agriculture solidified his place as a leading scientist in the South during the early 20th century. He researched soils, fertilizers and how European conservation efforts could be used in specialization in types of farming in the U.S. Known as “Mr. Soybean,” Williams was a leading crusader for the soybean, recognizing that it could mean money for American farmers. He encouraged manufacturers to use soybeans to produce paints and varnishes. “Following an announcement by the United States Department of Agriculture that more American land was in soybeans this year than ever before, agriculturalists here recount how Professor C.B. Williams, head of the agronomy department at State College, probably had done more to bring about the popularity of the legume than any other person,” The News & Observer once reported.

Another member of the first class who was celebrated for his research was Samuel Erson Asbury. He was one of the later students to enroll in that first class, coming to A&M in January 1890 from Burke County, N.C., looking like an angel-faced cherub. He excelled in agriculture and chemistry and was instrumental in leading the Leazar Society, which was predicated on the notion that engineers and scientists needed to be well-rounded through reading, debate and oration.

Five surviving members of the first freshman class reunited in 1939. From left: Samuel Marvin Young, Walter Jerome Mathews, Frank Fuller Floyd, Louis Thompson Yarbrough and Charles Burgess Williams.

Asbury left North Carolina to take a job as a chemist at Texas A&M University in 1902 and flourished as a Renaissance man in College Station, Texas, until he retired in 1945. “Doc” Asbury became one of Texas A&M’s most celebrated professors, studying fertilizers and rose cultures. But he also loved poetry, music and Texas’ state history, even going so far as to compose a musical based on the Texas Revolution of 1836. When Asbury died in 1962 at the age of 89, he willed a collection of books on roses and one on Texas history to Texas A&M, along with a musical library containing five grand pianos and 700 classical records.

Most of the inaugural class made their careers in North Carolina. Frank Theophilus Meacham spent time at the Biltmore Dairy in Asheville, N.C., working for the Vanderbilt family. William McNeill Lytch was principal owner and operator of the Laurinburg Machine Company, which repaired machinery, after an early career on the Florida railroads. Others, like Asbury, left the state. Edward Moore Gibbon became a city engineer in Jacksonville, Fla., and an engineer in Memphis, Tenn., where he died in 1952. Frank Fuller Floyd left for Knoxville, Tenn., where he worked for the Knoxville Sentinel for 11 years before breaking into the coal industry with Jellico Coal Mining Company in 1905. He eventually began his own company, Floyd & Montgomery Coal Company.

Some of the Class of 1893 never left Raleigh. Samuel Marvin Young owned and ran the S.M. Young Hardware Store on Martin Street for a number of years. He was the last surving graduate of the Class of 1893, dying in 1968. Louis Thompson Yarbrough, who had come to the North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts as a boy of 16, worked as a state engineer in the North Carolina swamplands and the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company before finally taking a job for the U.S. Postal Service, where he worked for 37 years. On campus, Yarbrough Drive shares his name as does Mary E. Yarbrough Courtyard, named for his daughter, who was one of the first female graduates from NC State and the first woman to receive a graduate degree from the university.

“We were some of the co-builders of this College movement,” Yarbrough wrote of himself and his classmates in a 1943 message in State College News . “We received much and gave much. The giving, to say the least, was our presence, for without students the movement could not have been started on the basic principles that resulted in its present success.”

Charles Wesley McIlwean was one of those with whom the movement began. He left his family’s farm in New Bern, N.C., to attend A&M. He didn’t graduate, but returned to that farm and expanded it to about 1,200 acres and even built a cotton gin. In 1906, he scraped his leg on a buggy he used for transportation and died of blood poisoning. But his grandson, Earl McIlwean ’58, continued his grandfather’s movement by coming to NC State. Earl, 77, often looks at that picture of his grandfather and his first classmates and wonders what they thought at the outset of the college.

“I’ve looked at this picture a lot of times, and I’ve always had that same question,” says Earl McIlwean, a retired city worker in Rocky Mount, N.C. “I wouldn’t say it’s fear or hope. My interpretation of that picture is that they all look kind of serious, like they’re ready to go into some unknown adventure.

“It’s kind of like, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m ready to get started.’”

Editor’s note: The author used many sources in this story including letters, newspaper clippings, obituaries, alumni records and past articles from the alumni magazine. The North Carolina College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts’ course catalogs from the 1890s also proved an invaluable source. Two books also provided necessary history and context. They were David A. Lockmiller’s History of North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering of the University of North Carolina 1889–1939 and Alice E. Reagan’s North Carolina State University: A Narrative History.

From their arrival in the NC State administration in the early 1970s, Clark and Witherspoon were forces on campus. They were among the first African-Americans to hold leadership positions on campus, and they used those roles to make NC State a more inclusive place.

“I don’t think you will find a more compassionate team of men who were so concerned about the details of life at North Carolina State for every single person who walked through the door,” said Dr. Sheila Smith McKoy, director of the African American Cultural Center, in a video that’s part of a cultural center exhibit memorializing Clark and Witherspoon. “They weren’t just engaged in diversity efforts for people of African descent. They were engaged in it for campuswide endeavors because they knew how important it was for us to move forward differently at North Carolina State University.”

Larry Monteith, NC State’s chancellor from 1989 to 1998 has called Witherspoon and Clark pioneers for diversity on campus.

Witherspoon’s career as a pathbreaker at NC State predates his tenure as a professor and administrator. He came to NC State in the late 1960s as a graduate student in botany. Witherspoon was the first African-American to earn a master’s degree at NC State and the second to receive a doctorate. He became an instructor after finishing his studies in 1971, eventually becoming the first African-American professor in university history.

Clark came to NC State as a math professor and associate provost in 1974. He was the second African-American administrator in university history. Witherspoon and Clark were founding fathers of organizations and programs that still sustain diversity efforts on campus today, including the African-American Cultural Center, the University-Community Brotherhood Dinner, the Peer Mentor Program and the African American Symposium.

One of the central pieces of the African-American Symposium, a summer orientation program, is a presentation called “Who Am I?” Clark devised it as a way of connecting young students to a rich cultural tradition with African roots thousands of years deep, African American Cultural Center Program Director Toni Thorpe said. It ends with students envisioning their own graduation as an offshoot of that heritage.

“The content of the ‘Who Am I?’ is really important for self-identity, for knowing who you are and where you came from,” said Janell Miller, a senior English major, in the exhibit video.

Clark and Witherspoon strengthened the connection between African-Americans at NC State and their heritage by launching annual trips to west Africa for students in the late 1980s. The trips were perspective-shifting events for participants, according to Carol Love, associate dean emeritus in the College of Natural Resources.

“To visit houses, to visit schools, to visit villages, it was an emotional experience,” Love said in the exhibit video. “(On) a lot of the bus trips I remember, tears were just flowing.”

Witherspoon stayed at NC State until shortly before his death in 1994. The Witherspoon Student Center, which is home to the African American Cultural Center, was named for him. Clark retired in 2007 but made regular visits to campus until shortly before his death in January 2012, Thorpe said.

This year, the African-American Cultural Center is reviving the community brotherhood dinner Clark launched in 1982 and renaming it in his honor. The event will take place March 21 at the McKimmon Center.

“Opening Doors: The Lives and Legacies of Dr. Augustus Witherspoon and Dr. Lawrence M. Clark,” an exhibit at the African American Cultural Center, will run until Aug. 1, 2013. Located on the second floor of the Witherspoon Student Center, the cultural center gallery is open from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Thursday and from 1 p.m to 5 p.m. on Fridays.