 Good afternoon. As folks that come back from lunch, we're going to get started just to keep on our schedule of time. So I do hope that you enjoy lunch. And be happy that you're back. And this afternoon's session is strictly going to be a series of different panels and presentation. The first panel we're going to have from some of the faculty in the School of Science who's going to speak about some of the opportunities some of the research opportunities, some of what they're doing and how students can get involved, participate in some of the work that they do. Now keep in mind that as much as we think that yes, we know this is a college, but high school students also have an opportunity to engage in partnering with us and being part of the research team. Because we feel that we want to even have continuity, so the continuity is going to occur if we include students from the high school level, the college students, we have the college students who have been to high school students, faculty members who have been to the college students. So that's a pipeline and that's what we're going to continue to embrace and to continue. So the first presentation is going to be a science presentation as I did see before from, we'll see a video shortly, of some of the research that faculty is doing in the department. Following that presentation, we're going to have someone from the city of New York, the director of industrial academic research. Now that's Dr. John Blejo and Dr. Blejo, he has worked with faculty members and helped them to do start-ups, start-up their businesses, and he's been very successful in doing that through different grants that he has acquired. So Dr. Blejo is going to speak somewhat on that process and how folks are going to take advantage of those opportunities. Next following that we're going to have an interpreter presentation again, because we've partnered with a school of business, we feel that we want students to take a different outlook as far as when you look at what you do at school and to be able to connect it because when it's all said and done, when you think of school, you graduate from college, there are three fundamental tenets or three tracks that one can pursue. One can get involved in entrepreneurship, one can go to grad school, or the world of work. So each of those are very important, but we feel that the entrepreneur part is one that's been missing along the way, so we want to really engage and incorporate the entrepreneurship as part of the conversation. So we're going to have a presentation, entrepreneurship presentation, and finally, we're going to have a policy presentation and of course some wonderful speakers who's going to be here speaking on public policy issues as it pertains to the environment. So, and of course at the end of the day we have our closing crisis and our pitch competition just to remind you, the students as in the audience of high school students and college students of 45 second pitch on next steps, what you've learned and what you intend to do after this cut this conference is over, and of course you have opportunity to win prizes as a result of that process. So with no further ado, middle school, high school, college students, you all open to the opportunity. And again, remember what some of the speakers said this morning, communication, again communication. So this is an opportunity for you to be able to articulate yourself in a cogent manner based on what you've learned and what your next steps are. So we look forward to your presentation. So now I'm going to call on James to start the video. I'm an associate professor of chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science and Agriphostology, I'm interested in your research group, and in particular, I'm a research associate concerned with different topics of research. We research factories in general and other type of devices. We also research product verification, regular radiation. We're also concerned with photosynthesis and respiration, and that's what we're going to talk to you about today. Photosynthesis and respiration are two biochemical processes of great importance on the planet. They enable life in its plant and animal forms. And we are interested in studying these processes from the point of view of nanotechnology and materials chemistry. In particular, photosynthesis and respiration are essentially mirror processes. Photosynthesis splits water to rise to oxygen, while respiration turns oxygen into water. And the net energy input is light from the sun. So what we do is to isolate the protein from the synthetic, from the material resources. As you can see over here, we isolate, for example, the protein called photosystem 1 from cyan bacteria. And then we take these proteins and we reassemble the mitochondrial and put synthetic protein on the graphene oxide. Our graphene oxide is a nanomaterial, which is only one act of thick. It's a newly rediscovered material that we are studying in parameterized very extensively. Thus we assemble the proteins on the surface of the phenoxide. We obtain what we call galvanic biorhybrid systems that we characterize either by optical vibrational microscopy and also surface characterization methods such as atomic force microscopy. Once we study this material, we have the experimental data. We also interpret the data and analyze them using quantum mechanical models and molecular simulations. The objective of this study is to study photosynthesis and respiration per se. While we're also interested in understanding the limitations of human performance and biological performance in living organisms, there are practical applications for our studies. The material that we use to mobilize the protein on the surface can also be used for protein propagation, which is a material of interest in the pharmaceutical industry. So we conduct this research with students at the undergraduate level, at the high school level, and we have graduate students and also post-op propellers. Hi, I'm Professor Shin at the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. My research area is developing analytical methods for trace organic compound and trace the organic compound in the water or air and soil cement samples. From this measurement, I'm trying to find out the fate and transport of those toxic chemicals in our organic atmosphere and in the air also to see the impact of those compounds on the cast. I'm currently working with the pharmaceutical foundation and the Newton Creek Alliance for the water quality and air quality monitoring. I'm currently working with the EPA grant in the project to see the greenhouse gas emissions. This is one of the instruments that I'm using at the field for the greenhouse gas sampling and to see how much of the hydro is impacting the emission of the carbon dioxide or nitrogen dioxide. I'm really excited to collaborate with the students. We've done hand-on experiments in the field, in the laboratory with our state art of the instrument of the analytical and the sample analysis. My name is Uriwashi Usalako. I'm an asthmatic study at the Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. My area of research has to do with gas hydrates. Gas hydrates are compounds formed as a result of the trapping of gas molecules like methane in cages of ants. The small-day applications of gas hydrate has to do with transportation of gases, storage of gases because essentially we're storing gases in eyes, providing more safer option compared to the pressurized method that is being used. We can also use gas hydrate technology for dissolution of seawater and the separation of blue glasses. One aspect of gas hydrate that I really interest researchers is the existence of a lot of methane that has a study form of gas hydrate dissolution. It has been estimated that about twice the amount of fossil fuel that has already been discovered in the existence of gas hydrate dissolution. So gas hydrate serves as this unconventional energy resource. The negative aspect of gas hydrate is that it's their enzymes in the oil and gas production. And what I mean by that is they sometimes form in the pipes that occur cruel and so they affect the cruel production in the oil and gas production. So there have also been high-profile incidents like the explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that led to the death of a lot of found people. So what I do in my laboratory is to try to understand the formation of gas hydrates. The formation of gas hydrate is very slow. And so we utilize surfactants, which are this soap-like molecules, that absorb at the under surface of gas hydrate to stop them from clogging together. And this clogging is what slows down the rate of gas hydro formation. If you want to do research in my laboratory, what you will learn about is how to make this gas hydrate. You will learn about how to measure surfactant solutions that help us to study the formation of gas hydrate. You will also learn how to use this equipment, it's called the Zether Sizer, to study the absorption of surfactants on gas hydrates. You will also learn how to use high pressure reactors to do gas hydrate formation. You will also learn how to use rheometers to study the flow properties of gas hydrates in pipes. My name is Dr. Denton, and I'm one of the researchers of the three-year Megadiverse in the Chemistry and Environmental Science Department. My research focus on the use of microwave as an instrument that's shown here. And this instrument is actually used to do chemistry in the lab. Now, just like you know, microwave is used at home to heat up your food very quickly in the lab. We use microwave to speed up reactions. Meaning that reactions that will take for hours, maybe four or five hours, can be done in minutes or even seconds using the microwave. So as a result of that microwave is very good for speed up reactions. Also good in terms of environmental benefits of using less waste because we use less organic solvents that are normally generated in conventional synthesis. And this is a plus, especially for chemists and for the environment. My project that I'm actually involved in is a synthesis of a very useful product, bicarbonic acid, which is a natural product, isolated from mushrooms. So this natural product is similar to the glutamic acid which buys the glutamate receptors and as a result it can be used to somehow activate or deactivate the glutamic receptors in the central nervous system. So my research in that sense is focused more on understanding Alzheimer disease, Parkinson's disease, these disease that have to do with the central nervous system. The next project which is a very good project that we're looking at is extracting some perishable compounds which we call forferols. These perferols help us to determine how fresh the honey that you use in the supermarket where how fresh it is. And these compounds won't swap. If you have too much of these compounds, honey is not so fresh. Well, those are two of the exciting projects that we have. And if you join my group, definitely you'll learn how to do organic synthesis. You also are not going to make compounds but actually isolate and characterize these compounds using some of the instruments that we have here at Megahevers College. And not only that, but you'll also be somehow involved in the biological aspect of these compounds that you make which we will definitely link up with the biology department to help to do biological studies. Hi, I'm Dr. Rajapaksha from the Chemistry and Environmental Department. I'm very excited to share this research during this moment. And my research primarily focuses on metal-based probes to study molecular interactions. So there are applications in both environmental and medical fields. One of the major applications is that you can use protein-incorporated nanoparticles to selectively remove heavy metals from complex solutions. So I study protein and heavy metal interactions. And given the high affinity, I incorporate those proteins into the nanoparticles and then removal will be biocompatible. And you can even incorporate these nanoparticles into straws, for example, using 3D printing. And you can remove the heavy metals as you drink through the straw. That's one of the exciting projects I have. And there you will learn how to fabricate the nanoparticles, how to incorporate proteins and how to purify proteins from different sources and also how to quantify the affinities between different molecular proteins and different heavy metals. So that's one of the projects. And another application is that I'm very excited about lanthanide special characteristics. Lanthanide chemistry is very different from all the other chemistries you find in any other element you find on the periodic table. They have long lifetime luminescence. That's the most exciting property they have. And other than that, they have their characteristic spectra that are very different for different lanthanide metal ions. And those characteristics can be used to study them or use them as good probes to study protein interactions. So these probes can be synthesized in the lab and these probes can be introduced into the cells. And you can selectively label proteins using these probes. And when the proteins are interacting, these probes will give up the signal. And because these signals are long lived, you can eliminate the background signal before you collect the signal from your probe. And that way you can increase the resolution for an example temporal and spatial resolution of your detection. So you can study protein interactions that cannot be studied using other methods. So in this project you will get experience synthesizing different organic molecules and characterizing these molecules. And also working with cell culture because you will have to introduce these probes into the cells. So you will get experience in working with cells and then studying cells using microscope. And I'm also planning to build a time-resolved microscope in the department and you will learn how to use the time-resolved microscope to study these protein interactions as well. So I think there are a lot of other interesting projects as well as there is a lot of room for your creativity also in my lab. So I invite you to come and have a peek and share this exciting research with me. Okay, hello everybody. I'm Dr. Pratt and we're going to do some trash talking in the hood. We're more correctly, we're going to be doing some trash talking in front of a hood. This thing here is called a fume hood or a hood for short. Why are we doing trash talking? Well, we're using all kinds of trash, municipal garbage, sewer grease, various types of industrial waste, waste plastic, and so on to make fuel. We're interested primarily in two types of fuel. Bio-diesel, which some of you may have heard of, it's the fatty acid methylvester. And it is used in diesel engines as a blend or as a replacement for petroleum diesel. Green diesel is another type of fuel that we make and that's more or less chemically identical to petroleum diesel. And we make it by slightly different processes that we're developing in the lab here. There's vegetable oil, but there's a shortage of the waste vegetable oil supply. So we're looking at other sources of waste oils to make bio-diesel. It's more difficult to do, but here we're developing new processes to do it. Bio-diesel is made by pyrolysis, we're breaking down of chemicals with heat to make other smaller molecules. And in the background here, we have a set of reactions using brown grease, or grease that is derived from the sewer system. We're doing a lot of good science here, but we're also interested in the business aspect of things. And we're looking towards commercialization, looking at the commercial feasibility of the projects. And we have a plans collaboration with the School of Business here at Medgar Rivers College. We're also doing some international work with groups in Malaysia and Vietnam. And I've placed several students in summer internships both internationally and domestically. One of them was at a bio-diesel company in Connecticut, others were in Vietnam and Malaysia. A couple of our success stories among others, our recent graduates were Travis Kenock, who was now a partner of the School of Business, Omar Gardner, who works for the Department of the Interior, and Joel Struthers, who was a recent graduate headed to graduate school soon. Students and faculty conduct their research in Medgar-Ever State of the Art Research Facility, where they use our enviable collection of scientific instrumentation, such as gas chromatograph, plasma mass spectrometers, high-performance liquid chromatography, IR and UV spectroscopy, thermogravimetry, nuclear magnetic resonance, X-ray diffractometry, and atomic force microscopy, as well as a comprehensive synthetic lab where we can handle even sensitive materials. New technologies are developed using modern microcontrollers and cutting-edge fabrication techniques like 3D printing, and all with the fabulous view of Brooklyn. That's an example of some of the opportunities that we have here at Medgar-Ever Scholarship, and we encourage you to take full advantage of them. So, I saw Dr. Leho just walked in from the back to the front, so I'm going to pull you right up the speed, and you'll get too confident sitting there. So, you're going to share with us some of the opportunities and some of the stuff that you do. Absolutely. Thank you. Wow. I want to do some of that research. Great. Can we get the first slide? So, before we start, I want to thank Professor Reed for inviting me. I know that some shout-outs went to Professor Crump and Dean Rohl. What I'm going to talk to you about, down a bit, sorry, it's a PDF, something called the CUNY Innovation Corps. Has anybody heard of the CUNY I Corps? Okay, that's great. More than I expected. I like that. The title really is Enabling CUNY Entrepreneurship. And I have to say that when we began this back in 2016-2017, Medgar-Ever's was an early adopter. It was really people like Professor Crump. Dean Rohl was a huge supporter of us, and I would say in every cohort that we have run since that time, there has been a large representation for Medgar-Ever's College. So that's why when I was asked to come here by Professor Reed, I jumped at the opportunity. I love talking to an auditorium of students who are in environmental sciences and chemistry. This is great. So I'm going to assume, yeah, go ahead, that you all were inspired by that great video and you all want to do research. So I'm going to challenge you that while you're doing your research, and as one of the speakers said, think about commercial potentials for the research that you do. Because if you think there is one, come to me. And we have an approach. What we do is we get you out of the lab, do your research in the lab, come up with an idea, then come to me and I'm going to get you out of the lab to test. As Professor Mohd said, this process of customer discovery, does anybody know what customer discovery means? Go ahead. Exactly where you are. I'm going to repeat that. He said you ask your customers their pain points. It's exactly what you do. So the way I like to describe it is we do hypothesis-driven business model creation. The data to test your hypotheses comes from what Professor Mohd was talking about, customer discovery. You get out of the lab and you talk to potential users and see if your ideas are correct. So it's a continuing improvement of your hypotheses. We have a whole process where you make many guesses and you go out and you get data and refine your hypotheses. That is called experiential learning. What I loved about that industry panel, they all said you need experience. So you have an opportunity here in Medgar to do experiential learning. That's what they're looking for. You make a hypothesis, you get out of the lab, you go talk to people, and then you synthesize what you've learned. That's experiential learning and then you'll have instructor feedback. Instructor is guiding you. In order to track your progress and also for you to refine your hypotheses, we actually have a web-based platform that allows instructors remotely to track your progress. So this is what we do. Next slide, please. So what I want to talk about are just two programs that we do and I'm sure I have five slides so we're going to go really quickly. This is what we call the Innovation Challenge. The Innovation Challenge is our introductory program to entrepreneurship. Not only is it sponsored by the National Science Foundation, it's sponsored by Capital One Bank. Anybody want to guess why Capital One Bank would want to give you money? Come on, let's meet up. What's that? Go ahead. That's right. I'm going to repeat what she just said. The bankers think if you're successful, you're going to give them back the money. That is exactly right. So the community, the Vice President for Community Affairs of Capital One Bank looks at this room and says there are business owners in this room. That's how they think about it. And they want you to become successful, hire people, need a banking professional. That's their business model. Sometimes if you see the Capital One ads, they're changing, you know, Capital One Cafes, we leverage that. They let us use the Capital One Cafes for these training programs. That's why Capital One supports this. These are just two groups that I want to point out. And I just want to say, like always saying, proof. I don't know how many people know Anise right here. Anise was one of the students that came from the business school. You also have over here, I don't know if anybody knows Akim and his team from Mentor. There's the man. Right? I want to talk to the high school students. Right? We had Valerie and Manningham. That's Valerie and that's Manningham. They came from BTEC, Business Technical High School in Queens. And they participated in the program. So I want to challenge Professor Reed and Professor Crump to say that if you have relationships with the local high schools, especially in environmental science and chemistry, we can take in high school students into our programs and train them. And it's a feeder. It's a way to get those high school students interested in doing environmental science and chemistry and also have them to come to many others. Right? That's the process. So we can do this. And I would say Manningham. So this is in Queens. Manningham wrote and got published in the Daily News talking about why she wanted Amazon to come. She was a female entrepreneur. She talks about our training program who viewed Amazon coming as a potential job for her. And you could look it up. It's in the Daily News. So she wrote an article about this. So this is how close you are. The room could be in these slides. So now, I want to jump to the other program that we do. And as I said, look at all of these people that we have. These are just two cohorts that we did. I could pick numerous, numerous examples of success stories and different teams. But I tried to pick teams that were in the environmental science space. Next slide, please. So our other program is what we call the short course. And this is a mega-reversed team. Do you remember talking trash in the hood? Roy was working on that project. So remember when Professor Pratt was talking about he's interested in entrepreneurship and developing the technology. Roy was an undergraduate student who was working on the project. And this is his talking about recycling materials, making biofuels. But what I want to point out is another team in such coincidence. We heard an enormous amount today about where New York City's water comes from. We also heard about sewer water. You understand now, like when there's a storm, the storm sewers open up and the waste water gets mixed with the sewer water or it's a real problem. Yannily, as a student at Brock's Community College, came up with a solution. She saw that problem and she came up with a solution to prevent waste from getting into the sewer system. She went through our program here and I just want to read what she did. You know, sewage salvagers will lower maintenance and repair costs for homeowners by preventing the clogging of submersible drainage systems through filtering degrees that cause infrastructural damage and flooding. She did 30 customer discovery interviews to develop that process. So this is someone who just heard of a problem, thought about a problem and went out and did customer discovery and figured out the solution. So I want to take a pause here. Does anybody know what yesterday was? International Women's Day. International Women's Day. Can I have some round of applause for this old female teacher? A little known fact that CUNY has recognized nationally for having a leadership role in the amount of women entrepreneurs. And I would go a step further and say women of color entrepreneurs. So much so that last fall the National Science Foundation reached out to us and asked us to host an inclusion summit in Washington, D.C. And what we did is the National Science Foundation gave us money to invite the presidents and provosts and we heard one of the speakers talking about the historically black colleges. We also invited provosts and presidents of tribal colleges to Washington, D.C. to partner with them because we lead the country in women of color entrepreneurship. So we are now partnering with the presidents and provosts of all of these schools to do training and to have them come to us and work with us and to develop programs of their own. I mention this because there's going to be a regional meeting, an inclusion summit and this is for Professor Reed to think about that will be taking place up in Boston in the New England region where there will be opportunities for funding and opportunities for doing what we're doing. It's coming from the National Science Foundation that's part of their includes effort that they're doing and we are one of the leaders in that space because of teams like this and because of the students who have gone through the program. The National Science Foundation has recognized that we are a leader in this space. It's you, it's all of you. You are the leaders and I'm wanting to get you all into the pipeline and continue to develop this. Let me talk about the pipeline next slide. So the two topics I talked about were the innovation challenge and the short forms. Remember, Capital One Bank has supported us. So in addition to just having a great idea and going through training, we have resources available where we can give you up to a thousand dollars to do that customer discovery. But that money is to go to meetings, to travel to places where the customers are to do that customer discovery. In the short course the amount of money which is mainly coming straight from the National Science Foundation that money is up to $3,000 and that's real money and now you can go across the country you can go to meetings everywhere that's what this is for. But the purpose of this is really once you go through this pipeline there is a possibility to get up to $50,000 from the National Science Foundation. This continues going further but I figured for this audience I just wanted to stop here. This you can easily get you likely can get if you do research with the faculty that were on the video just before. If you have some research experience this is appropriate. But ultimately you can go to the $50,000 and let me go to the next slide for the summer. Here is O'Meel for those people who know I just want to point out this is a team from Queensborough so Matteo and McKenna were winning the $50,000 grant and for all the faculty members this is Mike Lawrence at Queensborough and it's a $50,000 NSF grant that goes to the faculty. With that I'll turn it over. Please participate in this program. I'll work with Professor Reed to get contact information. Question? So it's a good question who gets the intellectual property rights? If the students do it, the students own it. It's done by the students especially for the first two programs. The grant that's the $50,000 grant that goes to the faculty member then that would be a QE situation. Because the grant is going to QE. And the innovation challenge and the short course is the students own it. And we have many student teams that go on and develop this. Okay? Any other questions? Please join in and thank you Dr. John Brown. Time of course is nobody's friend in these situations. The music and the Academy Awards is coming on. But we do thank you very much for this information. Most of you will certainly have an opportunity to speak to this after the Home of Proceeds. We are now going to we have two presentations to go over three actually. But first, both of them have to do with the importance of entrepreneurship and policy. Through the day we've been going through a lot of the details and very important scientific information as it relates to the environment and environmental concerns. What we are going to talk about or what you will hear about with the balance of this afternoon has to do with two of the very important aspects. You've heard some reference to entrepreneurship and the tremendous opportunities that are available for individuals who look at the economy as you look at the environment in terms of economic and entrepreneurial and business endeavors. So we want to hear about that. But the other aspect that we also want to hear about has to do with the importance of public policy as it relates to the environment. You've heard this morning from governmental officials about how government policy impacts the water we we drink, the air we breathe and everything about everything in the environment which we live. So with that, as they say with no further ado three presentations by Taiwo Oyani and Edwin and also Masato Sakiri and I'd like to ask at this point Taiwo Oyani who is the co-founder and lead engineer at Relay if you could please come for your first board together. Yeah. See if my man is getting done. Everybody had lunch now, I know it's slowing down a little bit but you can actually give them a real round of applause. Relay is okay. So Relay is a software company that helps businesses connect to their customers using SMS. We started about a year and a half ago and we've grown to where we are now and we'd like to share this story with you. Next slide. Alright, so we're immigrants, first of all from Nigeria. Thank you. I went to Howard University for my undergraduate degree and started finance and I worked in consulting for a couple of years. It was good but it was not what I really wanted for myself and I went on to do economics at Johns Hopkins and that's where we started the whole idea. Alright, so I also went to Howard just like Kevin said. I have a bachelor's in chemical engineering and a master's in computer science. So we've actually been I guess in entrepreneurship for maybe 10 years. I took Dr. Crump's class at Howard in 2007 or Micah, he always tells me to call me Micah I'm not sure why. So I think we can get into the presentation actually. Next slide. Okay, so what we're really hoping to achieve today is to encourage anyone here who is thinking about doing business to take the first step. Like I imagine we went to Howard, it's a great school but one of the things you noticed early on is students are typically set on the path to go get a job once you graduate. It's absolutely a good thing for you to do that. We did that. But we want to make sure that people here understand that there is a second option which is for you to go start a business. And for us that happened like you said 10 years ago but because we're international students we didn't have the flexibility to actually do that. Visa restrictions and things like that so we had to take regular jobs and weekends and evenings we did rainstorming sessions we wrote things down and then tried to talk to as many people as possible about our ideas. And so yeah, we make that conscious decision to say jobs are great but we want more for ourselves. We want to have the freedom to control our own destiny and for us to do that the only way to do that effectively is to start a business. So I'm hoping here that we have more people who graduate from school and make the decision to go start a company and hire people and create a lot of value in the society. Next slide. So the second step is we made a ton of mistakes. We've been doing this for about 10 years now we've been doing this for that long and in that 10-year period we've made a ton of mistakes. I think one of the things that we did wrongly was we built products that weren't able to sell very quickly. First of all, it took us too long to build some products and when we built products it took us too long to get them in the hands of customers. Some mistakes we also made was we tried to raise money and tried to get our friends to help us build a product. I didn't have a background in computer science or chemical engineering, like I said. And just trying to find a friend or someone to build or trying to outsource to other companies that took us maybe two years to just get past that. So there were a lot of mistakes that we made on the way. Sometimes we built products that we thought was the minimum viable product we thought that's the best product you could build but by the time we got into the hands of the customer we realized that it's not good enough. So yeah, we've made a lot of mistakes in the time in the last 10 years that has kind of brought us here. And my goal, our goal is that we can help people, mentor people to kind of reduce the amount of mistakes you have to make. It's part of the process but certainly if you make the same mistakes we're going to over again and that's the problem. So the entrepreneurial path this is just part of it it's just making mistakes and learning from that and then kind of growing from there. It's just part of the process. And this speaks to some speakers here already mentioned customer discovery is key we've built a lot of products you know, just on our own without really asking if the customer is really one of what we're trying to build. So we had at least two apps that we had to shut down and we just spent time talking to people that you're trying to sell a product to before you build anything. I think that's the key in the question here. Next slide. There's a popular saying I don't think I really know how it goes but you're not really qualified to solve a problem you don't know enough about and in our case that was us not being software engineers and what we had to do to get to that point like you said was for him to go back to school. Keep in mind he had a job at Goldman Sachs and he quit to go learn how to code. So it wasn't an easy decision. For me I had to quit my job too at Goldman Sachs to confirm good cash but we decided this is what we want to do and we had to go apply the skills for us to be able to do that. Just to talk about the last slide you know, if you're trying to start a company and you do not have the skill necessary to build it or to start a company it's easy. You can go on YouTube Udemy, there are a ton of websites out there where you can learn stuff and if you're a company you do not necessarily what it depends on the kind of company you do not necessarily need a degree or need actual academic training you can learn how to write software out of code online easily, within a month or two you can start building stuff. So I left my job in 2010 at Goldman which was right after the economic downturn and people were saying I was crazy I left my job, I went back to school to study how to code and I basically had control over how we built our company. So something else that I had to do as part of the working process software essentially lets you as a business interact with customers and for me I had to go work at a call center I was probably the most qualified agent, over qualified person on the floor I took thousands of calls and I really learned what the process is for a company who has 3000 agents, how do you manage that interaction where you have hundreds of thousands of calls coming in, how do you route it what's the software set up like how do you build a system that wouldn't work for these kinds of customers so I took a job that paid a very small sum and I had to do that because I knew there was value for me to learn so when we say go learn go apply to schools it's not necessarily you going back to college if you know the industry you want to go work in or build a company in and there are small batteries for you to get a job in that industry it's absolutely okay and important for you to do that alright so the next step we took was we paid attention to trends now we really used our maybe fifth product I think last we built two other companies one called Shelflet and the other called Rumbos Shelflet was built in 2013 so 2013 was when Uber, Airbnb, Lyft all these companies were taken off so basically crowd sourcing was taken off and we thought how about books you have all these books you use right after the semester you have to take it back to the bookstore itself for 20 bucks you have to give a friend or try to sell on Craigslist so our goal was crowd sourcing is taken off why can't we allow people to rent your books out to their friends and we tried to build a company we built a product selling was a bit difficult but being attention to trends is really important the other thing is we built a text payment app called Rumbos in 2014 so in 2014 there was just this saturation of apps most people use maybe 20 apps tops on your phone and building another app takes time and just takes time to get the rankings you want in the app store so we thought let's build a payment solution that uses SMS the SMS app is always on your phone you cannot delete it you cannot do anything about it so it gives us an easy distribution so one of the things that we have done just in the last 10 years is we always try to pay attention to trends and when we built Relay which was Rumbos became Relay in 2017 the goal was we saw that SMS was becoming much bigger within the communication space and so we thought let's add a message into Rumbos and then rebrand as Relay and we did that and that's kind of led us to I think that's the title of the slide it led us to having over 12 million customer interactions on our platform so the key is to always look at the trends things happening now on social media, Instagram Snapchat, things like that and say how can I plug into that trend to build a business that is sustainable just to note going in that direction a lot of us have really good ideas a lot of us have really good ideas of what we want to work on it's very important for you not to be married to your idea as good as you think it is you know that good and don't ask people NDAs to share your ideas shout it out from the rooftop tell anyone who is willing to listen because you don't know where you're going to get help from just a little extra insight that will get you to be the right product since we're cutting this short we're going to have a workshop even at 6pm in the school and Kim has the information on where we're going to be meeting we're going to get into more details about how we build relay where it's at now we're just kind of going through a lot of stuff it's 10 years of stuff in like four slides so we want to get into more details learn about your ideas and things you want to do and maybe give you more direct instruction and also tomorrow morning I think we're going to have brunch with the team also I came in and the other guys so if you want to join us also we can do that and just kind of talk thank you very much and another round of applause and I want to thank Dr. Reef for giving me the really wonderful task of cutting people off it's my job but we do really appreciate it we have one more presentation on entrepreneurship topic and that would be from Masatomo Sakaiwi yes oh here we are yes please please come forward please he is the chief operating officer make sure I don't go over 10 minutes and put my stop watch on my name is Masatomo Sakaiwi my friends call me Masa and I came from Japan last year on a program which is between the NYC EBC and CUNY it's a program called Into NYC where a bunch of international entrepreneurs are invited to NYC to help CUNY and its students, faculty to be able to share ideas and hopefully start companies that will become very big so two things I want to do in the next nine minutes is to just explain a little bit about myself because I'm a resource to all of you including the high school and middle school students anybody in Brooklyn essentially can ask for my time and the other part of it is just to explain to you a little bit about how this happens in terms of the steps so the next slide please this is a little bit about me I'm maybe not a typical entrepreneur I'm kind of a late bloomer in the beginning I started out my life in the finance world in the investment banking and hedge funds and private equity places like the Merrill Lynch and the Carlisle Group I actually made pretty good money there and I joined finance because I thought it was kind of the life blood industry and I learned a lot and I guess I made some money as well but I kind of got bored of it and maybe as an entrepreneur that's one of the things that happens to you you kind of get bored of the status quo once you kind of think you learned something you want to move to the next thing for me it was making money from money didn't seem so interesting anymore so I wanted to go to other industries which actually did something and one of them was like the airline business and the other was a manufacturing company called Keto they make hoisting cranes so I did that for seven years actually a little bit longer if I include some of my Carlisle days where I was actually out at the company and then I really learned how things are built what the manufacturing process is how marketing is done how development is done and then I kind of got bored of that and then I said look all that stuff is something that's already laid out in front of you maybe you can prove it a little but you're not really doing something from the beginning and so through partly the NYCBC community program I was able to come to the United States to join a fintech company called Peugeotity we have something we are in a space called supply chain finance and we essentially provide cheap money for suppliers of the world using the credit of the buyer and we put that on a tech platform so it's very seamless and it's very cheap and I've been doing that for a year and a half and while I've been doing that I've been helping out with your evers kind of in the following way so next slide please so first it starts with you and your idea and to be honest with you your idea may be a great idea maybe a so-so idea it may be an idea that maybe it doesn't start out maybe it starts out so-so but as you refine it you can make it something better and met your evers and I and a few other entrepreneurs like myself can help guide you through the thought process of thinking understanding if it makes sense or not there's various issues and today we had some very good speakers talking about what things you have to think about including customer discovery or thinking through the business model or thinking through the actual demands or needs of the market so we also can help you do that and then once we kind of push back on you a little bit baby because you know we want to make sure we don't want to just say hey your idea is great and kind of watch you fail we want to make sure you succeed and to do that we may ask hard questions a little bit tough on you may take some time but we will try to kind of guide you through the deep process of being a startup and part of what we will do after that is to kind of introduce you and get you involved in these are some just examples and I will give you even more detailed examples on the next slide but for example pitch competitions accelerators that could give you both some seed money and network and I guess iCorp is one of these and also sometimes your idea will need some legal advice and certainly if you are going to set up a company you might also want some legal advice and then it kind of goes from there to even talking to end users you may need some engineering needs if you are going to have a prototype also there is consultants in various areas and also venture capital which has lots of money so we will as I guess looking at iCorp's presentation today and thinking hey that's a great resource and I have heard of you I should have known more about you but please forgive me I've only been on the scene for six months maybe we should talk we will try to guide you and help you in that direction and if you look on the next page so here we have Edgar Evers professors and supporting entrepreneurs like myself and then there is a pitch competition I don't know if you know CUNY startups but they are one of the places that have a competition that you can get exposure other colleges that I just happened to know of Smith and Tulane of course there is lots and lots of colleges that have pitch competitions and also incubators so there is like the X-Stars Entrepreneur Around Table Association or Wine Combinator they are different places that can help you to kind of move to the next step and I also kind of mentioned some law firms that are also in the startup phase so in the last slide I think it is the last slide so there is an actual case that I just wanted to really run through with you because I think it will give you a concrete example of what can happen which is and I just got OK from her to say her name Jessica David she is a senior majoring in psychology I met her through Professor Kromp Professor Kromp introduced me to her and since then and she has an invention which is adding extensions it is a device that adds extensions for women primarily in a very expedient way and so she had already filed for what is called a provisional patent back in October so I didn't help her in any of that but she essentially came to me right after that and since then in the last how many months since November maybe five months we went through all these different things and these are just kind of the summary so for example trying to figure out what the actual market size of her product could be or what the value proposition is so how much faster could it be or how much cheaper could it be could it be is it cheaper for the end user is it cheaper for the salon to use it all this analysis we also talked to different attorneys because our original attorney didn't seem maybe so good like three other attorneys involved to get different estimates from them we drafted a founder's agreement we did customer discovery surveys we're still not done with that but we've started that and then all the way to a couple weeks ago we went up to Cornell to talk to an engineer who is thinking about putting together a prototype for us and last but not least we entered into a competition with Smith College the Draper competition and we were accepted as a semi-finalist so next month I guess in a few weeks we will be going over there pitching so things are going very well so and I guess the next slide just my contact information it's pretty easy if you want you can be any stage of your idea I'd be happy to brainstorm and I'd be happy to introduce you or refer you to these different resources that I mentioned so thank you very much I'll thank Dr. Reed as well for having me come up with no introduction whatsoever so actually I'm with NYPD and I'm in charge of security and yes I wanted to thank also Dr. Reed for not letting the string show as she just has been my name is Professor Wallace Ford I am a member of the faculty of the Department of Public Administration which is responsible for the policy portion of this today's activities so we are going to just so we kind of have the run of show here we are going to have an initial presentation by Ms. Rias Salter Ms. Salter is in a senior program as well she's an attorney consultant, educator, clean energy law and policy expert she is she works on energy law and regulation in multiple jurisdictions including Hawaii although she now lives here in New York and you can ask her why she left Hawaii to come to New York and I'm sure it's for a good worthy cause but it is important and as I mentioned earlier and what we will be speaking about today after her presentation we have two other members of the faculty of the Department of Public Administration to join her in a brief robust discussion with questions and answers about the whole notion of the relationship between any concerns that any of us have with respect to the environment and the law and policy you will hear about what has happened over the last two and a half years under the administration of President Trump or as I call him he whose name shall not be spoken but we will indeed want to know, we all need to know we're going to be knowledgeable about these matters the relationship between law, policy and government and the environment and all the environment issues we've heard about through the day and I will now it is now my pleasure to introduce Dr. Michael Crump because he won't get off the stage I had a band when I was in law school and I used to sing songs and I think this is the part where I'm supposed to sing a song to just kind of keep things going okay it's been a long day okay and speaking of long days before we ask Ms. Salter to come up please give yourselves a round of applause it was a very inspiring day a lot of hard work went into it but nothing happens without you so we want to thank you very much and at this point it is indeed my pleasure to introduce and please join me in welcoming Ms. Mariah Salter hello everybody I am so pleased to be here to speak with you today thank you Dr. Reed thank you Dr. Ford and I will reiterate thanks to everyone because it is hard to stay for the entire program so it's great to have your support as we close out the day so I just wanted to speak to you briefly as Dr. Ford said the Trump administration has had a lot of repressive environmental policies across the board from energy to environmental health and safety however throughout these dark dark times the states have really been doing a lot of progressive work on clean energy and environmental policy and there really is a lot happening right now in New York state that could I think really impact your entrepreneurial opportunities there's going to be investment in the clean energy economy clean energy jobs and water infrastructure so I thought that I would just give a backdrop on some of that and I suspect I've been just really excited to see the various professors and resources that you have here at Medgar Evers and I'm sure that the folks that I've been hearing from are very connected to Brookhaven and others who are directly involved and where some of these programs are going to be ramping up so we'll go ahead to the next slide please it's just a little bit about me it's in the program already Dr. Ford mentioned it I'm an attorney clean energy advocate I also do community outreach I mentioned I was talking to Dr. Ford over lunch especially when you're a younger student graduate school can see really far away do we have parents in the audience parents so I'll just say that it's something I don't usually share but when I was in law school I was a single mother so I was able to do it so if that's something that you would like to do I'm sure that this is something that you could do as well so next slide please oh yeah professors please if you're interested in energy justice or energy related issues please get my book and use it in your classes thank you you know on Amazon next slide please alright so really in my mind this is all about you because there's a young woman who I think maybe some of you guys have heard of right as part of really a youth agenda has brought forward something on the federal level that's being referred to as the green new deal so who here has heard of the green new deal just about every single person right this is about you guys this was about the youth agenda this was a young woman and her supporters from New York who came forward and put this on the agenda in a big way so this is really about you it's about your future it's about the young people so next slide please so what happened I mean look this is my take on the politics you know so you can take that with a grain of salt but I think in New York Governor Cuomo decided this is the party I want to join and so he came forward this year in his budget what he is calling New York's green new deal next slide please so I'm not going to read everything on this slide but what is in the budget this year in New York is one and a half billion in competitive awards for large-scale renewables 2.5 billion for clean water infrastructure just big big numbers in these areas and this money is going to go towards research it's going to go towards infrastructure development and I say we'll talk a little bit about you know later in terms of like what will actually come out of this but this is on the table this year and also Governor Cuomo has brought forward the idea of the most progressive renewable energy goal in the entire country bigger than Hawaii which has 100% renewable energy by 2045 next slide please sounds great you know Cuomo wow he's so progressive next slide please but hold on a minute a little something happened in November I think people here know about and that we have a we used to have a split control legislature and now we have democratic control with Ms. Stewart Cousins and Ms. Tracey what happens if you go to the next slide that three years ago the assembly passed a climate and community protection act now the climate and community protection act and Cuomo's Green New Deal have a lot of good things in common and I'm really behind and here for many of them but I think that it's important to really the few things that I'll point out is that the CCPA has things that are really pointed at redistributing some of the benefits from the energy sector so it specifically says 40% of the current money that's used for clean energy and certain programs should instead be diverted specifically to go to vulnerable communities environmental justice communities in New York to help increase resilience and help communities prepare for extreme weather and help people in New York get better jobs in fact the CCPA requires that there be a prevailing wage for jobs that are created with these funds so while there's a lot of good things in both bills I think that from what I would call an energy justice perspective there's more goodies in the CCPA and they already passed it they weren't able to get it through the Republican you know they had dual control but now things are different next slide please so really we'll see what happens what tends to happen next slide please is that the arms of government the house and the assembly and the governor the executive branch will come together and work out exactly how all these projects are going to play out but the reason that I think it's important to talk about is because when the executive puts it in their budget that means that there's money earmarked for some big things to happen so we're going to see what they ultimately hash out but I think it's going to mean some new directions and some funds coming hopefully to the direction of institutions like this and other things that you know that we should all stay aware of and we'll see how it plays out last slide we'll be quick when we said we were promoting entrepreneurship we weren't kidding please join in thanking Ms. Salter again Ms. Mariah Salter part of our program we have with us two members of the faculty of the Department of Public Administration we have Professor Gregorio Mayers he's a new Professor Mayers Professor Mayers is an alumnus of Medgaris College by the way and he brings a tremendous governmental experience having been a senior advisor to Mayor Blumberg during the Blumberg administration and having served as the head of the Environmental Control Board amongst other responsibilities that he had and we'll speak to that in just a moment and this is Dr. John Plateau Dr. Plateau is the chair of the Department of Public Administration during the administration of David Dinkins he was Mayor Dinkins Chief of Staff he has as I said served both as a dean and now is chair of the Department of Public Administration and brings again a wealth of experience in the areas that we're talking about the connection of policy and government and law to the environment so as I think Chris Cuomo says let's get to it right so we're just going to I don't think I need to do a lot of moderating here at the moment Professor Mayers why don't we ask if you would begin just I'm sorry Professor Plateau I believe you have a brief PowerPoint that you're going to reference well we'll go in that one okay yes we'll we have that PowerPoint it's the speed version of it and we'll get to it speed version there we go okay thank you wow folks so pay attention that's a long title um very recently just about a week ago Medgar held a major summit on gentrification and what I'm attempting to do here is to intersect this whole question of home ownership land ownership with the built environment there's all types of environmental issues and if we don't hold on to the land and building the homes the businesses that we have you're going to have a lot smaller customer base to do everything else that you may be dreaming about as entrepreneurs next that was the conference that was held churches I want to acknowledge the Caribbean Research Center and their visionary leader Dr George Irish who recently transitioned is anybody bring a bell to the room let's give him a round of applause he did a he did a multi-year study funded by Carnegie looking at our Caribbean American neighborhoods throughout the city and one of those items was looking at churches because they are major landowners and buildings in our community assets and we found that just in our local zip codes not even all of Brooklyn there are over 600 church institutions that's building and land and a lot of the work that you're talking about in terms of some of the commercialization of our environmental research could impact very positively these could be the customer bases churches our faith institutions and our homeowners which I'm going to very quickly move to now next that happened to be my church in that slide by the way okay so citywide on the far left there are over a million homeowners in throughout New York City over one million next there's an anomaly though if you look on the right there's a locus plague of mortgage foreclosures throughout the entire city at the dark of the area the bigger the problem so you're looking at almost the entire Bronx a whole swath across central Brooklyn including where we're sitting right now at southeast Queens next those are patterns trends in homeownership throughout the five boroughs in New York City over the last almost 15 years the table on the right gives us a breakdown so Queens has the largest homeowner group in the entire city of that million closely followed by Brooklyn if you look at it racially there are half a million white homeowners throughout the city the second largest group is 200,000 black homeowners three quarters of them are right here in central Brooklyn and in southeast Queens next slide again the problem side look at number one on the right one, one, two, three, six anybody living in one, one, two, three help, here we go Canarsie Flatlands is one of the epicenters of the foreclosure crisis and look at those neighborhoods Springfield Gardens, St. Albans these are top ten in the entire state having this problem, next slide homeownership in Brooklyn next slide next slide here we go again Canarsie Flatlands are at the top of this top ten Springfield Gardens St. Albans, Hempstead Places, Rochdale where we live next so this is that one, one, two, three, six we're talking about Flatbush Avenue on the south Linden Boulevard streets that are familiar to us the whole section Canarsie Flatlands south of Linden Boulevard this is where the big problem is one, one, two, three, six we're losing, we're hemorrhaging our homeownership assets next Queens next next so zeroing in is one thing to say, borrow Queens AD stands for what Public Puppy A majors assembly district so this is one assembly district there are 60 of them in the entire city and look at the years 2009 to 2016 so in less than 10 years over 2,000 black homeowners have disappeared in that one small district and there are others like it, next slide you can look at it in terms of congressional districts too three of the 14 congressional districts in New York City have over 80% of all the homeowners they're in Congressman Jeffery's district which we're looking at here and next next Congresswoman Clark's district these are the two in Brooklyn and the one in Queens so Congress members Clark, Jeffery's and Meeks have over 80% of all black homeowners in New York City are in just those three congressional districts we can drill this down in any way that you want state senate assembly district and when I say we also affiliated with the Department of Public and men is the Du Bois One Center for Public Policy and we're within the school of business and let's give a shout out to Dean Joanne Rose next next a new program here comes our Governor again he announced right in this auditorium a year ago in March literally just 12 months ago in this very room a program called Vital Brooklyn and what is Vital Brooklyn next it's an 8-point program half of 1.4 billion dollars is going to go to transform healthcare delivery throughout central Brooklyn but there is also a very large funding if you look at number 7 down there for affordable housing almost 600 million in affordable housing thousands of new units being built are in the process of being built throughout central Brooklyn but we need to hold on to what we have as well New York City next slide I'm not even going to go into detail also has a major affordable housing program but we should not be distracted to the new programs coming online when we're losing our homes and our churches right out from under us at the same time we're almost done related Census 2020 is upon us that's a once in every 10-year count of all people in the United States and it's used to distribute money power and our constitutional rights money over 800 billion dollars a year from the federal budget is allocated using census data driven formulas 800 billion a year times 10 years that's 8 trillion dollars we have a major undercount problem in communities of color we're always getting undercounted so we're not getting our fair share of that 800 billion dollars a year as a result so that's another project that we collectively need to focus on those census formulas are also driving funding for education for scientific research for mass transit public safety etc so that's another project upon us we're almost done here it's already projected look at that's a map of what United States right you see what color New York is New York state is red they're already projecting we're going to lose two congressional seats due to the undercount our traditional undercount here so we have to turn these things around we'll lose money we'll lose political representation then we won't have the voices making decisions about environmental justice education healthcare etc next that is it that's an 8 point program we won't go into detail maybe we can get some of those issues or recommendations out on the table during the question and answer next slide next voila plateau at this point I'd like to so with that thank you Dr. Plateau if you please continue then Ms. Salter you'll be up next thank you good afternoon good to see you and students community members it's been a long day I'm not going to take a lot of your time just a PowerPoint presentation just really want to get you into the conversation around three legislation as President Ford indicated we teach law and policy three of us Plateau, PhD Ms. Salter as well as an attorney so we look at the public policy and the legal aspect how do you address these issues these environmental justice issues which you saw from some of her presentation and Plateau looked at some of the policy concerns with both demographics and in terms of loss of homeowners issues a period of impact that really does take a right into environmental issues I wanted to just ask a quick random question how many of you here familiar with the actual physical location where the science building is adjacent outside of the parking lot what facility was housed there you know raise your hand the current new science technology building the sanitation garage right, thank you how many of you know what year was that I mean if you know closely see, he's mostly close so that was put there when we talk about environmental justice that garage and part of that policy was put there in the late 1969, 70 in terms of where we should house it how many of you also knew that that sanitation garage it was really the depot so we would have maggots when I was a student you would have rats running back and forth the stench it was really you could eat your lunch bags by a close by Tony had kept taking the photos because he was part of this movement and well Professor Ski came later on of that so lo and behold and I'm getting to the point of environmental justice and frankly you're familiar with that that station was a collective garbage in Midwood Brooklyn not here so the station was not servicing this community there were garbage from other parts of the district that was house here when I got to City Hall I tried to figure out when I was working to try to get the funds for the sites built in how did that happen and how did it get there and they said well part of the community board meetings part of the community engagement we were sleeping at the wheel dean so we didn't show up at the meetings so really so that was put from that neighborhood over in our neighborhood because they didn't want it in their neighborhood I'm getting to my point of environmental justice environmental racism and not only that but putting it on the side of us as resident voters to be educated, to be informed to be proactive and to be diligent with the policy and social issues that you could challenge your energy and resources there to fight it so I thought that was a perfect opening to look at the environmental racism environmental justice because it occurred right here for many years we went through that stench that smell not only us as students but members of the neighborhood of the community, children, schools back and forth so gradually it took a lot for us to move and get it back to the other neighborhood and I told them to remember the policies we had to pay yes needy, the other neighborhood said well it's going to cost negotiation because we don't want it anymore in our neighborhood so we had to do some harsh trading and millions of dollars and funds back in your neighborhood to get it back where we belong so that's how we were able then to get this new building this new science and technology building up and running so we're not into a proactive as a community, as a group that would not have happened so I'm saying that to young folks here that again, all politics are local like I told you who's a performer speaker to make that statement, which was who? Tipo Niel, right? All politics are local so you have 59 community boards here, we have community board 8 and 9 here each of those boards have an environmental committee, where they have a housing committee so once in a while students here, mega-revers or if you live in a community even if you can't attend the meetings you should look at the monthly meeting and see what's on the agenda what are some of the topical issues that are coming to your community board and you should know that not even a liquor store not even a new development can just walk into your neighborhood unless what, they come through the community board but you have to be there you have people who voice your concerns you have to talk to your elected officials about it so I've urged you to be involved and do that I wanted to talk about three city councils my colleagues spoke a lot on the state side and both of them spoke about the state and some federal I wanted to just bring your attention to three legislation one and the city council passed originally first in 2005 by city council member Charles Barron and then reintroduced again by his wife Ines his Intro Environmental Justice Plan 8868 so I want you to look that up those who are public administration students this it looks at environmental justice and it means that fear and that equal treatment involved of all persons regardless of race and color it forces the city council and the agencies in the city when their policy decision on builders commercial builders and developers that are coming into the city to develop that they take concerns on the impact that it will have on our community lastly the law affirms that no group should be in disproportionate sheer of negative environmental consequences resulted from industrial, municipal and commercial operations and the execution of federal state or local programs so here you have the local government saying even if the federal government the EPA is looking to put a building or have a business that will generate a certain amount of impact on our neighborhood this legislation on a local level will say hold up wait a minute right and you have the other environmental justice groups who will come to the aid next is local law 152 this was signed in August of last year it was created to reduce the amount of waste that can be taken to a transfer station in four neighborhoods that fear the brunt of the city's waste management infrastructure so four neighborhoods this follows a lot in terms of what my colleagues spoke about those neighborhoods because of course Brooklyn and the Bronx certainly you know Manhattan are some of those neighborhoods so again what this does it reduces that can be taken to a transfer station in four of those neighborhoods and that is critical because Brooklyn certainly is one of those now the percentage of those stations what percentage of those transfer stations do you think that we have here so total waste transfer station anyone know the total maybe want to take a guess total waste transfer station we have in this five boroughs any environmental faculty members here give it a shot okay 38 38 how many of you go straight to do you think that we have here in this borough let's look at the Bronx Queens we have a total in the city we have about 26 right yes it's staggering so to make matters worse the current system it overburdened the amount so the law look at limiting the impact of how many of these stations going forward can be in our neighborhood to make matters worse this is under the current system these overburdened communities have permitted capacity to accept even more than they already do so it had to stop and clearly I don't have to tell you about the health issues with asthma right and all many other issues that impact our children in K-12 in the system when they don't know what impacts them it's not only living in the public housing system alone it is because they're surrounded and you may recall several years ago where environmental justice group had to sue the MTA that does depot Harlem right because in that catchment area so many kids regardless of what color you were had asthma had respiratory issues and conditions so again this bill is called the waste equity legislation addresses these issues so again you know wrapping up we have to be vigilant but as I said earlier you know what AD means so you should know also what CD means your councilmatic district you should also know that your congressional district and your SD your senatorial district but one of the things that Dr. Blair who's not here always does in her class and I do it now in our intro to PA-103 is to have you write a letter to your elected official no student should be here not know who represents them you should know that you should be able to see and what committees they sit on and lastly after I heard you if you live in a community board that is one of those that listed up there this is 8 and 9 there's a book that is published yearly called the needs the district needs one of the district needs of the community and it takes it an area of youth housing development seniors it lets you know the date and what we need look at the environmental issues look at some of the concerns write letters to your city council members so again these three legislation that were introduced in the city council came from advocates it came from students, it came from a coalition a group of people because again in closing policy and legislation you can protest is good you can say rah rah rah 2 4 6 3 we don't want in here you know and that's good if you go home and feel good you're still there so policy and legislation by your city council members these three that I just put forward here and you're more in the pipeline so I want you to take note of those three and push for more legislation to curtail the amount of waste transportation and the environmental quality of life issues that impact us here in this city thank you thank you professor thank you professor mayors I'm going to ask about Mrs. Salker if you'd like to add some additional comments just prior to doing so let me point out we have two microphones one here and one on the other side of the aisle here and we'd like to dedicate a few moments more than some time for some questions and answers and comments that you might have it's supposed to be interactive at the end of the day of course so if you have a question or comment you can please come forward you'll be recognized in the meantime if you'd like to comment on what you've heard so far and then we're going to move into our interactive moment thank you I guess I'm really it's almost I have like a question for both of you and maybe for everybody here because we've got on the state level A environmental justice initiatives a lot of groups have been pushing for this for a long time you yourself and you also aware of these issues that were going on for a long time and now we have the state level you know they're pushing now they've been pushing for a long time to codify more of these environmental justice principles into law that will actually give communities more of a voice in the process so it doesn't have to rely on you know people having to jump up on a day to day yet you know why has it been so difficult to make some of this happen and what do we got to do to see some of this pushed over the edge and of course including the fact that the justice principles bring new deals are supposed to help things like the whole ownership issue which was very compelling and I wasn't aware of the extent to which it was a problem in this area in particular I think one aspect of it is education learning I've had for instance my city council person and my actually my 70 person on certain legislation would say to me what is your opinion of what you thought this is why an institution like Menger the School of Science and Technology the Environmental Science Department is a good think tank resource and a lot of time when these matters come up in session on the legislative front many of our elected officials may not be familiar with it they may not be able to perform the white paper to address it they may have to turn to some other institutions or organizations so the more awareness, the more education and institution such as Menger Evers and Brooklyn College and many of the other schools who have such programs and science programs or faculty are expert subject matter experts I think that relationship I think if you're right it will start to be codified and make it easier that you wouldn't have to have this burden and give the community members a good voice but also to I think next year we should have many members of the Environmental Committee and Albany and City Council here as well and I think they want to hear from us so I think that partnership that built in relationship helps them in strengthening them more that when the matter comes before them meeting with the governor and meeting with on the federal level on the EPA and EDP they're informed and able to talk more about it and perhaps even get help from us in terms of private legislation Solid Waste Management is big business multi-billion just think about it there's 9 million of us in New York City and think about all the waste we've disposed of it's big business to package it, burn it ship it out of here so there are forces in commerce and industry that's why the work that you're doing here as faculty is very important you're on the cutting edge of potentially creating new technologies and what we're up against is the holders of the old technology that are making money right now and if they can see the light that there aren't new technologies coming on to seeing new ways, better ways to literally handle our business double entendre and tend to that then we could move forward more progressively but it's going to take first of all it takes invention and scientists there's an important marriage going on here that's being pushed the commercialization of your research is very important okay to get it into the civilian sector into the business sector and then that's going to create new ways of living for us we're going to run out of space with the old ways of disposing of God how many more acres is Pennsylvania going to let us dump our waste from New York City we can't put it in the ocean anymore so new technology, science and research and pushing commercially in new directions entrepreneurs think of new ways I brought up that million homeowners because that's potentially a million roofed solar panel installations that could be done that's potentially one or two million new toilets that waste less water when we flush them that's new lighting that uses less electrical current that's the commercial things that's why I wanted to bring up the housing and home ownership but I think those are something okay thank you yes Dean Roll and before you ask your question I'll give you the microphone I have one of my classes PA260 class here and if we don't get at least two questions from the PA260 students that extra credit we talked about what did you show me how smart you really are this question this question is to Professor Flato anyone else who can answer it the gentrification in Brooklyn primarily is being driven by buying new man economics that can't be done what is driving folks out is the value of the property and the tax thing so how are we to stop the eroding of black ownership actually there's a I believe it's this week or next week there's going to be a major public hearing at Barrow Hall with the members of the state there are a number of things that can be done one of the things that happened after the housing crash we didn't crash Wall Street crash and they landed on us they tightened up the requirements for getting homeowner loans and we have a lot of our folks who didn't redefine print when they signed up for mortgages 10 and 15 years ago and we're seeing the aftermath of that now balloon payments some of those loans could be renegotiated but there's not enough we have to bring our financial institutions to the table they were all bailed out they're all healthy now other than Lehman brothers they're the only ones that went down and doing very well right now in the financial sector meanwhile they're holding the paper on the mortgages that we're losing our homes out from under us so there needs to be more advocacy, more pressure and I think our legislators are realizing that homeowners are voters there's a correlation between owning a home do you have a huge stake in your community when you own, when you have a mortgage renters we can come and go some of us try to go before we even paid a homeowner but homeowners have a huge stake in our legislators that's why I put that one district up there if you lose two or three that's two or three thousand or double that number of votes disappearing out of your political base somebody else can come that could be the handwriting on the wall for you to not be there in another year or two so policy changes we need more cooperation I think from the financial sector we need more educated consumers so that we don't sign on the dotted line for transactions that we're not ready to handle and some of our folks need help a lot of the homeowners that are being taken advantage of are seniors they've been in those buildings for 20, 30, 40 years now you're getting bombarded with mail notices and if you're not following through and you don't have a support system that's literally checking your mail or providing you guidance or you're one month behind on your water bill or you paid off your mortgage so now you have to pay your property tax you know that kind of follow-up isn't happening then that's the kind of follow-up I think that could help us sustain our real estate homeowner base in our community we have a couple of students who are coming forward your clock is ticking a bit while they're coming forward let me just ask a question to the panel one of the things that we definitely want to make sure our audience is aware of that have taken place with respect to environmental policy particularly at the federal level over the last two years and what impact do we see do you see or can we reasonably expect in the near future as a result and that's jump-all we would like to it's so bad that it's worse I think than really it's a truly it's a worst-case scenario because it really is from the energy perspective the fossil fuel industry has moved in literally to our federal levers of power and taken over in their own interest so not only did we see the ending of the Obama era clean power plan which was the mechanism that the Obama administration sought to employ in the states to reduce greenhouse gases and really was the mechanism that allowed him to go to Paris and make that landmark climate agreement America has a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so not only were programs like that completely shuttered but and I'll just speak for another second on the energy situation because it's bad across the board but President Trump has been promoting energy sources like coal that are no longer economic so he's actually saying at greater cost we want to continue we want to let's keep open coal plants that aren't making money when it would actually be cheaper to shut them down and have an alternative fuel so it's really bad I was going to say something very similar that the current administration is reversing the policy of the previous administration about moving to an alternative fuel solar wind water and literally I think it was an announcement of a coal executive I think he just announced a coal executive that had an EPA it literally was also an industry yes it's literally been moved into power to literally go in roll back I'm sorry I get very upset because it's actually depressing because they want to roll back things that are no-brainers things that we have the clean air regulations that means that thousands and thousands of less people die from pollutants in the air rolling them back and some of it almost seems to be just with joyful abandon some of the wildlife protections the things that are being rolled back for wildlife almost just seem pulmonistic like it it's really there some real yahoo that have been put in charge of not only our energy policies but protecting our natural resources our wildlife it's really bad we have you want to introduce yourself please that's one out of two by the way a 260 glass solar yes oh thank you so I'm Aaron I'm a PA major last name would be Cassiano PA major of course so at the beginning chairman talk about talk about gentrification my question is for people who can't get into higher education for college and stuff what's the way they can learn about gentrification and help people that are going through gentrification at this time there are again I believe certainly state and local government levels are now very cognizant of the issue and the problem there are a lot of town hall meetings as professor mayors mentioned there are a lot of meetings being called throughout our communities now to confront this issue and it's actually been found that in some cases state and local government has been part of the problem for example there's a city program right now called third party transfer that comes out of New York city department of housing preservation and development and it looks like some of our older homeowners got caught in that bureaucratic maze where they didn't they weren't even aware that their homes were being transferred out from other than because they were maybe slightly behind in payment of property taxes or water tax water and sewer tax there are a lot of advocacy and community groups out here that are mobilizing on this issue also so the bottom line is you're absolutely right you don't have to be a student here at mega revenues college as professor mentioned know who your legislators are either they were on top of the issue and you need to get on board with them or they're not on board with the issue and you need to show up in their office or whenever they're calling a meeting and begin raising issues like that my counselor what are you doing about this issue or that problem gentrification higher rents displacement of tenants using illegal tactics to displace tenants or move them out of their apartments so there's a lot of activity that can go around for community college students and our academic missions as well thank you very much we appreciate it we've got time for one two more questions one more question we have a student right here yes good afternoon my name is jenai jeter my question was jenai jeter my question was in regard to the new initiative of affordable housing it seems like a probe for many people who have currently been facing financial hardships and pain but how do we kind of get more on the road of rent stabilization and home ownership stabilization over forcing these people out and giving them the second option helping them to stay where they are and making living more affordable for them instead of pushing them to apply thank you for your question the first thing is to look from a policy perspective if you were to travel to Europe or any other country in the world and you see what they do for housing we don't do that so there are three types of home ownership or at least from having the perspective where you live that you're a boat one, you privately own your own right condo whatever or travel that you have two, you're one of those one million apartments in the city that are rent stabilized and controlled meaning before 1969 for those apartments and those are a subsidy if you pay 1,500 it's really 2,500 it's a subsidy from the legislative branch that give that program because we don't build but a federal policy level and there is nature that's it there are only three forms interesting that you will have to live on it will mean that either from a federal level or a state which we don't do we will have to change our policy on housing and how do we treat citizens as a whole and how do we fund from the $4.5 trillion budget in Washington to our $168 billion in the state which you know the percent in China were $90 billion in the city which was in a loan for the NYPD's Department of Education $24 billion so for us to do a massive in terms of that has to be a policy decision it has to be financially in terms of whether the city alone could not build somebody homes to HPD for affordable housing so you know we have the 80-20 rule where the landlord and developer needs to have 80-20 people 20% will go to affordable housing and then the other 80 market of the fact that the developer the constitution of BIPA amendment taking part I'll close with this you cannot say to a homeowner who has a building your mom let you build a six-storey building and you your direction program and you decide hey I want to go corporate I want to sell this building you know you really can challenge that from a constitutional perspective the taking part where the government would have to compensate you by moving the program part of the HPD program so I'll let Rachel answer a bit a bit but is this a larger issue that we don't address in our country we don't respect the right of how many okay I'm zeroing on just one key issue that I think we're not paying enough attention to it's called AMI Area Median Income what we're calling affordable is not affordable because they're setting the income brackets too high and there's no it's not a law it's policy and it can't be changed and there have been a couple of instances in New York City where the local community pushed back and got the government to lower the definition of affordable so I think that's a strategy that we as residents let our elected officials know we want these numbers lowered okay and advocating that same policy with the housing agencies that are overseeing the process but AMI we have to lower the definition of affordable so that those of us that are on the verge of displacement can actually move into these new apartments at our income level when they do become available so energy efficiency can also help lower utility costs okay thank you very much please please join me in thanking our guests our speakers Brian Solter Dr. John Plateau Professor Gregorio Mayers and thank you to our students who are participating as well that is the end of our policy presentation program and it's now my pleasure to turn the microphone over to Dr. Derek Skeet I'm pleased to say that in addition to being moderator I'm also Dr. Skeet's style consultant I did a pretty good job today can you say thank you okay folks I mean this was a wonderful day I mean I gotta say that this was a wonderful day I think it's good to the students in the audience this is the opportunity that you have been waiting on all day two things I'm going to call Mr. Akim Klinch who's going to number one announce the winner of the hashtag competition and number two he's going to be coordinating the 45 second pitch competition for both the high school students and the college students so Akim you're going to cover this announce the winner of the the pitch of the hashtag competition before we do the pitch all right so this person has been active all day on Instagram hashtagging and it's Mario so the next part is for the students and high school students like you guys can come up and try to win some prizes I may be affected by a mental card again but I'm up and won some prizes and I pretty much come up here and try to give off what you have for the day which one did you get from the day you had 45 seconds of pitch and we got to try to hit some points of opportunities you saw today feasibility and creativity so if you saw a business opportunity that you like or a research opportunity an opportunity to come and do something that met her come up you got 45 seconds and we got some great prizes I promise they're great but we got some great prizes you could just line up right here if you want to participate any high school students it's more than a $50 gift card if you're shooting a cash all right so she said it now I didn't want to say it's a cash if you want to come up with some cash 45 seconds Megan's students Megan's students I see y'all trying to get up unless y'all want me to talk to them please we got a lot of things nobody else nobody else there are high schools high schools high schools I want some ice cream. No, you can't do that. Just be loud. I see somebody. We got two, we got two over here. Come on up, come on up. I saw you. No more white shoes behind you. Get up. All right, so we're going to start. Have you felt during your kitchen that you're giving better? Come on up, money's up the ground. All right, my name is Akil Kord. I'm a finance major. The perceptions I gain from this meetup or event is networking. Your network is your network. So, seeing that, I would like everybody to pull out their phone and follow my business on Instagram, because that's how I'm going to do my network. So, my business is called Black Fire underscore percussion. We are a percussion group, and we perform for corporate events, for schools, for parties, for our mentors. We just did one. So, any kind of support is relevant to us. And that's what I gain from painting and everything. Yes, Black Fire underscore percussion. Follow us on Instagram, especially our high school people. I know you all like social media. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. My name is Randolph Chwals from Professor Regas Class, which is biotech 211. What I heard about all of them from the conference is that the Green New Deal, it sounds like an environmental life, but in my heart, what I heard about what Ryan Solter said about against Trump administration, you see, I don't like Donald Trump, by the way. Donald Trump always is a story behind, he always kept saying, let's make America great again. But this is Megan Evans College. We are alive to continue the world because I respect my faith to the world. Because my life, I will continue. I was told that I need to be here because I was in a chemistry class. Initially, my teacher said that, you know, you never know where a life's going to take you. So, it's an event that we should come out to support. And that's why I'm here. And I think that I've learned so much from today. Resilience, relationships. Just so many things, what we can do with science. And I'm happy to be here. All right, so we're just going to do this because we don't have time. We don't have time for judges. We're going to do this just to make up a crowd. So, I don't know where 12 is, who imagine he's here too. So, I'm going to go over their head and you guys make noise for who you guys like the most. My boy right here. We separated. So, try to do it again. All right, let's make some noise for him. $100 gift card. This has been a school list. Oh, first, first. All right. First, we got Zachary. In the abundance of water, a foolish thirsty by Bob Barley. And that's significant to me because I'm Jamaican. The school lady that she made up a solution that water from natural disasters would mess with the water from the sewer system. And I learned about con-editing and Capital One National Bank saying something about like sponsoring people that wants to do investments. Just to bring out the environmental science class. To be honest, I'm going to be really honest. I hated environmental science. I really didn't think environmental science was for me. But then, today, really, I actually become a mechanical engineer. I didn't realize how much mechanical engineering had to deal with the environment. And just knowing how water systems are so involved with everything and how the environment is really the future of everything. Because waste environment, what's the world? This event, I may actually learn a lot about environmental science. And hopefully, when I take this AP exam, it's a four. We're leading next on the stage. You got 40 points left. We can take you to that based on how they are going to create a program to help us preserve more fossil fuels with the final veto. I'm also learning that through the CAT scale going there, reservoir over 50% of the water that we use in New York is from that reservoir. And 1 billion gallons of water is pumped through that reservoir. We got lands next. This whole event opened my eyes in many ways. I'm telling you. I learned so much about investment. I always want to do a little bit. And so I kind of show how Capital One, if you're knowledgeable and able to and your product is good, they will use you and they will share something because they know you're going to pay you back. And I got a shout out to Mr. Burnett. I'll be holding down for you. You'll be there for me. And I am up front, man. Thank you. Yeah, I'll have a shout out. All the cannabis and that if it's legal, a lot of businesses will be, people will be able to make new money. You don't need your own business. How you have to follow the trends, great store, network. That's it. Oh, it's closed off. So let's get everybody back on stage. All right. So I'm going to start over here. The first, the third place. Love it. The 10th place winner is Asuma Jalo. This morning when you registered, they gave you the bad news is that's the first second and third place, which is a laptop, a tablet, and a Fitbit. I love that. So without saying anything else, we will start with the, we'll contact you with four twenty five dollar gifts. So take out your tickets. Picking out the tickets. I'll just call on people at random to come on stage and pick out a ticket. This is one of our five daughter members in the chemistry and environmental science. Pick out the first ticket. Another twenty five dollar gift card. Eight five zero going once. Twice. Three three nine one one five. Twice. More. Three three eight nine zero three. Three three eight nine zero three once twice gone. Three three nine zero three three. Three three nine zero three. Thank you. Another twenty five dollar gift card. Three three nine one two zero. Three three nine one two have one. Next. Three three nine one six six. Three three nine one seven six. Three three nine one four zero. One more twenty five dollar gift card. Three three eight eight nine two. Next, we have $250 gate certificate. 3 3 9 14 9. 3 3 9 1 9 5. 3 3 8 8 3 1. 3 3 8 8. So we're going to do the fifth bit, the third prize. 3 9 0 7 4. 3 9 0 7 4. 9 3 9. 8 9 3 9. 3 3 8 9 3 9. Hopefully within the week, we'll call you to come in. Fifth bit. So now we're going to do the tablet. 3 3 8 8 9 9. 3 3 8 8 9 9. 3 3 9 1 6 1. 3 3 9 1 6 1. 3 3 8 9. 3 3 8 9 8 8. 3 3 9 0 0 6. 9 0 0 6. 9 0 8 6. 3 3 8 7 8 2. 3 3 8 7 8 2. 3 3 8 7 8 2. 3 3 9 0 7 0. 9 0 7 0. 9 4 3 9 1 9 4. 8 8 1 0. 3 3 8 8 1 0. 9 0 8 5. 3 3 9 0 8 5. 3 3 9 0 9 5. 9085, between 9094, 8039, between 8039, 9010, between 9010, 8793, between 8793. And any staff who holds that number agrees to go again to one of our students, or staff members, other than faculty, together. Just history that I'll give you. 838791, 838791, 8853, 338853, 339191. And even when we are at the end, I'm hoping we all look at this at the beginning of new relationships and the launch banquet event shows. But that said, I hope I kept my promise of providing you an enlighten, an enlightening, fun-filled day with relevant information. Thank you. I'd like to present two awards to two very deserving individuals. The first individual I would liken on to the engine in a car. We see the fancy car running, but often we don't see the work the engine is doing behind the scenes. So for that reason, I would like to present a hard-working, well-oiled engine of this conference for over 20 years. Mr. Muhammad Bangura. One goes to a relatively new addition to our staff in the School of Science, but nonetheless, he's already left his mark due not only to his qualifications and work ethics, but his willingness to reach across the lines to promote science entrepreneurship collaborations among faculty, researchers, and college students. That person is Dr. Sam Groveman. We bring that video together and then take all of our research facilities. Mr. John Gibbs Award presented to Dr. Sam Groveman in recognition of your contribution towards innovation and science.