University Of Texas At Dallas Doctoral Student, Geosciences Alumna Named To Inaugural Class Of Quad Fellows
University of Texas at Dallas electrical engineering doctoral student Satwik Dutta MS’20 and geosciences alumna Jade Knighton BS’17 have been selected for the first cohort of Quad Fellowships, a multinational scholarship program launched by the governments of Australia, India, Japan and the United States (the Quad) to build ties among the brightest next-generation STEM scholars.
Each of the 100 master’s and doctoral students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) was selected for their commitment to innovation with an eye toward positive social impact and collaboration among the private, public and academic sectors. Each scholar — 25 from each nation — receives a $50,000 fellowship to study in the U.S. The program was created in 2021, emerging from the first in-person Leaders’ Summit of the Quad between President Joe Biden and the leaders of the other three nations.
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The fellowship recipients will participate in trips to each country that encourage cross-cultural exchange and will have networking and professional opportunities focused on the intersection of STEM and society, ethics and innovation, and emerging technologies. The fellowship program is operated and administered by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative of Wendy and Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, and is supported by founding corporate sponsors Accenture, Boeing, Blackstone, Google, Mastercard and Western Digital.
In a December statement congratulating the recipients, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan saluted the inaugural Quad Fellows as diverse, interdisciplinary, inspiring and exceptional students who are the next generation of great STEM minds.
“These young people will bring the Quad closer together, and, with them leading the way, we are confident our future is in good hands,” he said.
Deciphering Early Language
Dutta, chosen as a Quad Fellow from his native country of India, began his graduate studies in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas in 2018. He has participated in multiple research projects that bridge the gap between spoken language technology and speech/language development or disorders. Dutta has worked with Jonsson School faculty at the Center for Robust Speech Systems (CRSS) in speech recognition technology, and with speech-language disorder researchers at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders and the University of Kansas’ Juniper Gardens Children’s Project.
Dutta’s goal is to create algorithms that learn to understand the speech of preschool children.
“It’s difficult for parents of preschool children to gauge their child’s language development, because they don’t know what is normal — they may have no basis for comparison,” he said. “It’s also extremely challenging for a preschool teacher to track the engagement of every student. Having tools that can provide frequent, reliable data on children’s classroom engagement can help teachers identify children who might need additional support or early intervention.”
For his electrical engineering master’s degree, Dutta worked with Callier faculty — including former director Dr. Thomas Campbell — in collaboration with CRSS on a project called SpeakEasy, an app for screening speech-sound skills in preschool children. For his doctoral research, he is working with CRSS director Dr. John Hansen, the Jonsson School’s associate dean for research and Distinguished Chair in Telecommunications, on quantifying effective learning engagement for child-adult communications in naturalistic settings such as classrooms, museums and households.
“Satwik constantly looks for ways to include others, especially undergraduate students in our research,” Hansen said. “He is a student with the passion to make a difference and change the world for child language and education advancements.”
Dutta’s research involves collecting audio samples via a small recorder placed in a pouch in the young subjects’ clothes. His intention is to develop a system that can not only distinguish and count the number of words spoken by a child, but also categorize interrogative words to gauge interactions with parents and teachers.
“A conversational AI system that’s trying to understand what you’re saying, like Siri or Alexa, requires an enormous amount of speech data. But not much young child speech data is available,” he said. “Keeping young subjects and their families’ privacy in mind, assisted by practitioners, we’ll be able to identify children who need more support.
“The Quad Fellowship will provide me with an opportunity to network with leading innovators in academia and industry, government and society, and can help me accelerate my research while also creating more awareness about speech, language, and hearing sciences and the role technology can play for the collective good.”
Digging into Planetary Science
Fort Worth native Knighton, a doctoral student in earth, planetary and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies how past extinctions might reflect Earth’s future. She focuses on clumped isotope paleothermometry to study metabolic and dietary patterns in extinct organisms. She is among the U.S. students who received the fellowship.
“UTD stood out to me [as an undergraduate] when I was looking to transfer from Tarrant County College because of its record of academic excellence,” Knighton said. “Knowing I wanted to pursue a PhD someday, I was attracted to UTD as one of the best places to get the solid science foundation I would need to be competitive in graduate school.”
When she was a geosciences senior in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, she worked in the Micro Imaging Laboratory led by Dr. Robert Stern, professor of geosciences, and Ignacio Pujana MS’93, PhD’97, professor of instruction in geosciences.
“Dr. Stern’s rigorous standards in classes and research projects helped me build study habits that I still rely on as a doctoral student at UCLA,” Knighton said. “I fell completely in love with paleobiology in Dr. Pujana’s classes, and he was always willing to talk to me outside of class.”
Knighton also worked with Dr. William Manton, now a retired professor of geosciences, on her fast-track master’s degree at UTD before ultimately finishing that degree at Mississippi State University.
“Dr. Manton’s mentorship and his work in health effects of environmental lead inspired me to pursue outreach projects in environmental justice,” she said.
Knighton is affiliated with the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science, a part of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability that is focused on diversity in environmental science.