The Battalion- June 25, 2019

TUESDAY, JUNE 25 | SERVING TEXAS A&M SINCE 1893 | © 2019 STUDENT MEDIA

GUARDIANS OF AGGIELAND Left to right: Jacob Fuller, Matthew Yevcak, Zachery McPhail, Benjamin Leahy and Evan Ross (not pictured) are the newest members of Texas A&M UPD. Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

NEWS

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The Battalion | 6.25.19

Abigail Ochoa, Editor-in-Chief Brian Bass, Sports Editor Camryn Lang, Content Editor Khadeeja Umana, Content Editor

Meredith Seaver, Photo Chief Brady Stone, Page Designer Sydney Clark, Page Designer

THE BATTALION is published once every other week during the summer (except

University holidays and exam periods) at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843. Offices are in Suite L400 of the Memorial Student Center.

News: The Battalion news department is managed by students at Texas A&M University in Student Media, a unit of the Division of Student Affairs. Newsroom phone: 979-845-3315; E-mail: editor@thebatt.com; website: http://www.thebatt.com.

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Subscriptions: A part of the University Advancement Fee entitles each Texas A&M student to pick up a single copy of The Battalion. First copy free, additional copies $1.

Online parking permit registration ENDS July 10 transport.tamu.edu

Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

Northgate District, located across from campus along University Drive, is the local bar scene for many college students and Bryan-College Station residents.

Rideshare safety on Northgate College Station police investigate fake Uber drivers

By Abigail Ochoa @AbigailOchoa88

Just Point.

Click. Permit.

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

Transportation Services

In College Station, Northgate is the hub of nightlife and is often filled with college students and Bryan-College Station residents. Recently, there has been warnings on social media about someone pretending to be an Uber and Lyft driver along Northgate, and the safety precautions to take to avoid getting in the wrong car.

The original post was uploaded on the private Facebook group, Texas A&M free and for sale. Although the author of this post is still unknown, the message was copied to several other Facebook profiles and was reposted on Twitter by Colton Chumbley, Class of 2016.

“I wanted to reach out to the community to let everyone that ventures to Northgate know about a man pre-

tending to be an Uber/Lyft,” the post said. “He’s been trying to pick up people (namely females) from Northgate, and other Uber/Lyft drivers in the area have noticed him as well.”

The post said the man rides in a black SUV. It also gave people advice on how to catch fake Uber and Lyft drivers.

“Do not offer them information, such as opening the door and asking, ‘are you (insert name)?’ or ‘hey, is this ride for (insert your own name)?’ Because clearly, anyone could just say yes and no one would be the wiser until it could be too late. If the driver is not capable of providing you with information that matches what is on your Uber/Lyft app, DO NOT GET IN,” the post said.

Social Media Officer for the College Station Police Department, Tristen Lopez said they have not received any calls or information about people pretending to be Uber or Lyft drivers around Northgate, but ask the community to reach out if they see something like this

happening.

“We would always encourage our community to, ‘if you see something, say something.’ Any suspicious activity should be reported,” Lopez said. “...

It’s not a waste of our time to check out something that is suspicious and find out there is a reasonable or logical explanation for what’s going on. We would rather be safe than sorry.”

Lopez said, if the post’s message is confirmed, the CSPD’s primary goal would be to get the word out on social media and let the community know what to look out for.

However, until the instance is investigated further, Lopez said it is better to travel in a group, especially when alcohol is involved, and to double check the driver’s information on the Uber or Lyft app before getting into the car.

“Whenever you can ride with friends that is safer advice than riding alone, but if you are going to ride alone don’t be afraid to ride in the back seat. Don’t ride in the front seat,” Lopez said.

NEWS

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The Battalion | 6.25.19

PROVIDED

AgriLife Research engineer Alex Thomasson, Vice Chancellor of Agriculture and Life Sciences Patrick Stover, Chancellor of the Texas A&M University System John Sharp, AgriLife Research Associate Program Director Shay Simpson and Director of Facilities and Construction David Leon broke ground May 22 on the Automated Precision Phenotyping Greenhouse.

Innovating greenhouse research New greenhouse provides plant analysis with high-tech applications

By Camryn Lang @CamrynLang AgriLife Research shows off Texas A&M’s green thumb with the building of a new robotic greenhouse.

By June 2020, A&M will have a new addition with AgriLife’s Automated Precision Phenotyping Greenhouse. The greenhouse will serve as a research center for A&M scientists to analyze plants and improve their favor-

able characteristics.

Construction has already begun at the facility at its home on the intersection of F&B Road and Agronomy Road. According to an AgriLife press release, the project is funded by the Chancellor’s Research Initiative Award, Governor’s University Research Initiative Award and the Research Development Fund Award. The greenhouse will cost around $3.5 million to create.

AgriLife Research engineer, Alex Thomasson serves as the robotics and sensors engineer for the project and said the advanced greenhouse will have robotic arms equipped with sensors to identify specific characteristics of a plants.

“What this greenhouse, with the technology it will have in it, enables us to do extremely rapid and repetitive phenotyping,” Thomasson said. “We’ll be able to measure and scan every plant in the greenhouse in about a four hour window.”

The technology being implemented in the greenhouse will include special cameras that will help researchers analyze the small changes a plant undergoes.

“We’re doing phenotyping, which means

we’re measuring the observable characteristics of plants,” Thomasson said. “If you have enough high-tech sensing capabilities you can measure lots of things about plants that help you to understand how they behave in certain environments.”

Thomasson said the robotic arm will have a raman spectroscopy sensor that measures the wavelength of light bouncing off the plant and indicates specific compounds. Although raman spectroscopy has been around for many years, the process of using it on a robotic arm to scan objects is entirely new.

“We inoculate [the plants] with some fungus and see which ones get infected,” Thomasson said. “We want to find the ones that don’t get infected so we can continue to work with those. We can tell whether the plant is infected by using a raman-spector scope and seeing how that plant and its metabolic materials respond to the light.”

AgriLife Research Associate Program Director and class of 199, Shay Simpson said along with the research the greenhouse will facilitate, the new building will offer instructional opportunities to students in the colleges of agriculture, engineering and physics.

“This facility will help in training grad students and undergrad students,” Simpson said. “It will be mostly focused on research spaces, but there will of course be teaching opportunities for student workers and graduates. Three different colleges will be using this space, so that will lend itself to cross-collaborations among students as well as the researchers.”

Simpson said although they still plan to open the greenhouse in the summer of 2020, improvements will still be implemented in the first year.

“At the opening, we will have two of the five robots that will go into the greenhouse,” Simpson said. “Right now we have the plans and the funds to put two of the robots in. But fully functional, we’ll have five.”

Thomasson said the purpose of the hightech building is to study plants efficiently so that they may create plants that survive the future environment.

“Resilient is probably one of the best terms,” Thomasson said. “Some of this is based on the idea that the climate is changing and how we breed plants that are resilient to effects like that.”

LIFE&ARTS The Battalion | 6.25.19

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Finding her feet again A&M student finds confidence through physical therapy

By Abigail Ochoa @AbigailOchoa88 Trials and tribulations are a common part of anyone’s life, but for Ashley Alario they came when she was just six months old.

As an infant, Alario caught a common cold. But unlike most colds that can be fixed with rest and medicine, Alario’s cold affected her spinal cord and paralyzed her from the waist down. She was then diagnosed with transverse myelitis — an infection to areas around the spinal cord.

This was just the beginning to a long journey of recovery for Alario and her family.

Due to this condition, her childhood consisted of mostly physical therapy from kindergarten through fourth grade, along with two surgeries to fix muscle tightness when she was eight and 10 years old.

“I think I knew pretty early on,” Alario said about her diagnosis. “I used to take medicine where the Texas heat was really hard on my body. I used to stay in during recess and in Kindergarten I had people stay in with me so I wouldn’t be alone. I knew from the beginning. People would let me know that I was kind of different.”

Alario regained feeling in her waist and legs as she grew up, and although she was never wheelchair-bound, she wore leg braces and ankle braces through elementary and middle school.

As her ability to walk and her muscle strength improved, Alario eventually didn’t need leg braces. But her walk still posed a problem in her social life — more specifically, her social life in college.

“She rehabbed and did better, everything was perfect but the people around her in the community kind of understood what she had and it wasn’t a big deal,” Alario’s physical therapist Benjamin White said. “When she started to go to A&M, in their [students] own way she was made fun of and it bothered her enough that she

wanted to get it taken care of.”

For Alario, her decision to return to physical therapy was difficult because of her experience with therapy as a kid. The only difference was this time around, she had a goal.

“It’s really about motivation because I used to go to therapy around the beginning of high school and my mind wasn’t in it. Nothing helped,” Alario said. “I didn’t do the exercises at home, I didn’t — I hate to say I didn’t care, but I was just jaded about everything. The whole treatment, I was just tired of it. Now that I had that break, my mind was really in it and I wanted to get better. It was a big difference.”

White said although he has been a physical therapist and neurological specialist for six years, Alario was his first patient with transverse myelitis.

“I had worked with people with similar diagnoses but I had not had that exact specific one,” White said.

“Especially with someone that’s that young. The unique thing about her is that people will have these conditions or can as a little kid and it’s real easy to give therapy to a little kid, but they can get left in the dust once they’ve had this condition forever.”

Alario and White began working together in the fall of 2018 at the Baylor Scott and White Clinic in College Station.

“Ultimately I wanted to be able to build her confidence,” White said.

“She presented to me very anxious and fearful. I think it was a mix of her not knowing what therapy would be like.

I wanted to engage her into what we were doing, meaning that I wanted her to know that I was there to help her, but also show her that I was going to provide her with something different than she had been given her whole life.”

In four months, the two bonded over Aggie traditions — Alario is Class of 2021 and White is Class of 2010 — and grew her leg strength so she could participate in football games and get around campus.

“When I knew you had to stand and balance on top of the seats the whole time, I was like ‘oh man, that sounds kind of daunting.’ We definitely prac-

ticed some exercises that would help with that in therapy,” Alario said.

White would also have Alario walk over obstacles while carrying a backpack because of the crowded classrooms she was attending during freshman and sophomore year.

As her time in therapy came to an end, Alario began to see changes in how she acted around campus. Now a zoology junior, Alario said she is more confident than ever before.

“I felt more confident being on campus and knowing that my walk looked a little better. It was all in my head but I always felt people look at me because I felt my walk was different,” Alario said. “It was really a confidence boost to know it was getting better.”

However, it was more than confidence that she gained through therapy.

“She met the majority of her goals which meant she walked fast, she wasn’t as tight, meaning that her foot didn’t drag nearly as much as it used to, and she was very understanding of how to manage this on her own,” White said.

Her change physically, opened up Alario to more opportunities like going on a ski trip to Utah during winter break.

“It was good,” Alario said. “I think the work I did the previous months really helped a lot because I think I’m in a very different place physically than I was when I started therapy.”

Alario said even though she doesn’t currently go to therapy, she plans to go back to work on higher level exercises and continue to gain strength in her legs.

Both Alario and White agree that her improvements came from more than constant exercise and therapy. It was changing her mindset and making her feel comfortable that ultimately helped Alario overcome her trials and tribulations.

“I can’t stress enough that because her emotional impairments started to resolve that’s why she was able to improve physically,” White said. “...I’ve PROVIDED found that the brain can’t learn a new task if its being stopped by fear or anx- Benjamin White and Ashley Alario, Classes of 2010 and 2021, iety.” respectively, bonded over Aggie traditions when they began working together in the fall of 2018.

Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

Left to right: Jacob Fuller, Matthew Yevcak, Zachery McPhail, Benjamin Leahy and Evan Ross (not pictured) reported on June 10 to the Texas A&M University Police Department.

THE NEW FACES OF UPD

Five new UPD officers seek to protect the Aggieland community

By Marina Garcia @margar211

On June 5, Chief J. Michael Ragan of Texas A&M University Police Department swore in five new officers, who all recently completed the Central Texas Police Academy’s 164th Basic Peace Officer Course.

Reporting for duty for the first time on June 10, Jacob Fuller, Benjamin Leahy, Zachery McPhail, Evan Ross and Matthew Yevcak began their field training. The officers will spend the next 18 weeks learning from their paired field training officers on how to serve as a UPD officer.

Fuller, Class of 2015, said he first got interested in a career in law enforcement after volunteering as a first responder for the A&M

Emergency Care Team.

“From there it slowly evolved to my interest in law enforcement,” Fuller said. “I like the idea of being able to help protect the members of the university and give back a little bit to the entity that gave so much to me.”

Fuller said that what drew him to be a member of the UPD was how the university educates all the officers on how to give back to the community they are protecting.

“I feel like the education that they provide helps the officers to provide a much better service to the community,” Fuller said.

Leahy, Class of 2012, has a background as both a firefighter and an EMS. He said having a career in law enforcement has always been a passion of his, and is now being trained by the UPD on how to keep others safe by looking out for certain hazards.

“As an officer here at UPD, we’re trained appropriately to respond to those hazards and we’re able to show others how to appropriately respond to those hazards as well,’’ Leahy said.

Yevcak was drawn to law enforcement because of his family’s history in the field.

“I have some family in law enforcement, especially my granddad. He was a cop for many years and so I just kind of wanted to uphold the family tradition,” Yevcak said.

For Yevcak, being a police officer for the UPD means continuing to keep the university a safe learning environment for both the faculty and the students. “[I’m] just making sure that they can get a good education and leave here with their degrees and not have to worry about any theft or any other crimes while they’re here,” Yevcak said.

Leahy said being an officer for the UPD allows him to give back to his alma mater and the Aggie family.

“Being a part of the Aggie family myself, it’s always been a great honor,” Leahy said. “Having the ability to give back to the Aggie family that’s given me so much is always an honor.”

LIFE&ARTS The Battalion | 6.25.19

Fostering selfless service Aggies help community affected

by Harvey through EpiAssist

By Luis Sanchez @LuisSanchezBatt Under the EpiAssist program, three A&M students traveled to Rockport in May to help the local community that is still struggling after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on Aug. 25, 2017.

Created in order to help prepare public health students, the EpiAssist program is a service learning program at the A&M School of Public Health that is open to both undergraduate and graduate students. EpiAssist provides the chance to serve communities and assists the state with data collection and analysis. Since 2015, more than 4,000 hours of service have been logged by the program.

EpiAssist allows for a mutually beneficial relationship between the experience-gaining students and health departments receiving help with community assessments. One of the most recent partnerships that took place was in Rockport, Texas. Suyash Gupta, graduate student Raïssa Lubanda and Claire Rowan worked with regional offices given grant money to conduct community assessments. The assessments are called CASPERs, or Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response, and question on the condition of homes, community and health.

Angela Clendenin, instructional assistant professor at the School of Public Health said the three students were split up while at Rockport, but were eager to help nonetheless.

“Most Aggies have that common core value of selfless service and so they want to help others. The students were excited to serve, they weren’t sure what they were going to find, but they were eager,”Clendenin said.

Rowan, Class of 2020, joined the Epi-

6 Assist program two years ago. She said Rockport was unlike other service she’s been involved in, because it dealt with people’s stories and not just numerical data.

“In Rockport we were discussing what people needed after Hurricane Harvey and how to prepare best for another disaster,” Rowan said.“Rockport was really different from the other [services] I’ve done. We got to really talk to people about what they had experienced and how we could help them.”

Suyash Gupta, Class of 2021, surveyed different residents about their pre and post Hurricane Harvey living conditions. Gupta said that many people were still displaced since the hurricane, with the poorer communities being affected the greatest. He found that displacement often led to mental health problems in the community.

“There was an RV community and each person was actually living in FEMA donated trailers,” Gupta said. “Three of the residents that had lived there had committed suicide in the past year, just from mental health issues and the inability to recognize what’s happening and the fact that weren’t able to be stable, especially after losing their homes, their jobs after Harvey.”

Gupta said the people appreciated the information being passed out by him and he was able to learn about many of the people there. However, of all the stories told, one stood out to him.

“This gentleman who we referred to as ‘The Fisherman,’ he was telling me that he actually took all the money he had and sent his wife and his kids towards San Antonio,” Gupta said. “He couldn’t afford to go with them, so he actually stayed in what was his house, [which got] lifted up and shaken around and he barely survived it.”

Overall, Clendenin said the students were passionate in their work because EpiAssist works to prepare students with experiences derived from lessons taught in class.

“There’s never gonna be a shortage of opportunities for Aggies who are willing to serve in any capacity,” Clendenin said. “Our students are taking classroom lessons and seeing them in action in the field and being able to apply things that they’ve learned is just phenomenal. It is unique and I think it’s valuable for students to be able to have that experience.”

PROVIDED

Suyash Gupta, Raïssa Lubanda and Claire Rowan traveled with EpiAssist to help Rockport. Locals are still struggling to recover since Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017.

SPORTS

7

The Battalion | 6.25.19

classifieds

When to call 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday Insertion deadline: 1 p.m. prior business day

HELP WANTED Athletic men for calendars, books, etc. $75-$150/hr, up to $500/day.

No experience. aggieresponse@gmail.com Meredith Seaver — THE BATTALION

Aggie football, track and field among ESPY nominations for memorable performances

By Brian Bass @brianbass4 ESPN announced Texas A&M has been nominated for three ESPYs on Wednesday, including awards for Best Game, Best Play and Best Sports Viral Moment.

A&M football’s 74-72 win against Louisiana State University was nominated for Best Game. The Aggies topped LSU in a seven overtime game during their regular season finale at Kyle Field on Nov. 24. The game became the highest scoring game in FBS history. Other nominations in this category include Los Angeles Rams’ 51-54 win over the Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football and Notre Dame against University of Connecticut in the Final Four.

Track and Field junior, Infinite Tucker secured two nominations for the Aggies.

Tucker was nominated for Best Play and Best Sports Viral Moment, for his dive to the finish line in the 400 meter hurdles at the SEC Championships to take first place. Tucker will face 16 other Best Plays for the coveted ESPY, and will face three others for Best Sports Viral Moment.

The ESPYs will be held July 10 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles, CA. The event will be broadcasted on ESPN and is set to start at 8 p.m. Central.

The Battalion Advertising Office is hiring for our Street Team. Work around your class schedule on campus! Interested applicants should come by our office located in the MSC, Suite 400, from 8am-4pm, for more information Ask to speak with Joseph.

HELP WANTED Work around your class schedule! No Saturday or Sundays, off during the holidays. The Battalion Advertising Office is hiring an Advertising Sales Representative.

Must be enrolled at A&M and have reliable transportation. Interested applicants should come by our office located in the MSC, Suite 400, from 8am-4pm, ask to speak with Joseph.

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to todays puzzles

Phone 979.845.0569 Suite L400, Memorial Student Center Texas A&M University

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