12/12/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 12/12/2024 11:40
Christina Hastings '17
In a field with a severe underrepresentation of Black women, Christina Hastings '17 is not your typical engineer.
While Prairie View A&M University has garnered a reputation as a leading producer of African American engineers, with the success of programs like the five-year BS/MS tract, the field remains largely dominated by white males.
Hastings is the second African American woman to graduate from PVAMU's electrical engineering program with her doctorate, having also earned her Bachelor of Science degree from PVAMU in 2017. Still, she takes her accomplishments in stride, primarily focusing on her professional plans of cultivating equitable, innovative solutions that will revolutionize the industry.
In the seventh grade, Hastings attended a math and science day hosted by Midwestern State University and saw mechanical engineers working with robots for the first time. That day, she declared to her mother, "I'm going to be an engineer."
Education reigned superior in the Hastings home, and attending college was a non-negotiable expectation. Creativity was encouraged, but there was an emphasis on pursuing a degree with longevity and promise. As expected, Hastings and her sister commenced their undergraduate studies on the same day, and in true sibling rivalry, her sister also completed her PhD studies at PVAMU in the College of Juvenile Justice in 2023.
With two daughters who've earned a doctorate and graduated without student debt, Hastings's mother's hard work and rearing paid off. "She was playing chess while I was playing checkers. She was always 20 steps ahead," said Hastings.
Not only was her mother an advocate for higher education, she set the first example for her daughters. During Hastings's freshman year of high school, her mother started her collegiate studies, and by December of her senior year, she'd earned her bachelor's and MBA degrees.
Having witnessed her mother's resilience firsthand, Hastings felt she had no excuse not to see her plan through. On the occasion she lost focus on her bigger goal, her mother was there to encourage her to go a little further.
Hastings gifts her degree and graduation day to her mother. "It's been 18 years since I told her I would do this, and I followed through."
Growing up in Wichita Falls, Texas, as the only Black family in her neighborhood and the only African American student in her advanced placement courses, Hastings experienced bias in the classroom.
She didn't know any Black women with doctorate degrees and had never even had an African American teacher. At times, it was difficult to ignore the microaggressions, but Hastings's mother was louder, reminding her daughter that the limitations others tried to impose on her were not hers to own.
"I told my mother I wanted to be an engineer, and she said, 'You can do anything.' So, when I got to high school, and my guidance counselor told me I couldn't, it never crossed my mind that she was right."
Hastings wants to eliminate biases like these from data input.
In her dissertation, "Enhancing AI Ethics Through Integrating AIF360 with Generative AI," Hastings provides fresh approaches for building fair and unbiased artificial intelligence (AI) learning systems. Her work explores sample reweighting methods and leverages generative AI to produce synthetic tabular data.
From a practical standpoint, her research can mitigate inequities in hiring, lending, and law enforcement and inform future regulations by policy and decision-makers. Though most think of Artificial intelligence as a robot, these systems can only operate from integrated data.
Data can be influenced by societal bias, further exasperating challenges for underrepresented communities. "We can see bias everywhere, and the data reflects it. Trying to mitigate human input is already a task in itself, but we must try to deem what is fair, defend it, and produce a more fair outcome."
Her solution reduces the exposure of machine learning models and contributes to transparent, ethical, and inclusive systems. The integrative approach, which merges computer science, ethics, and social justice, could help lead to technological advancements that transform historically unfair institutions and practices.
Christina Hastings exemplifies determination, intellect, and the power of belief. After graduation, she will work as an assistant research scientist at PVAMU and ultimately plans to transition to a profession within the industry.
She's honored to be one of the first Black women to break through the glass ceiling of STEM and to have done so as a PVAMU Panther. Amid her achievements, Hastings remains humble, offering simple but profound advice to other young girls who aspire to be an engineer: "Remember your why, not someone else's. You are the one who has to go through it. You may get bogged down by everything, and at times, it's hard to remember why, but you must not forget your reason for starting the journey."
For Hastings, her why changed over the years, from a genuine desire to pursue engineering into a quest and fulfillment of a promise to her mother, community, and even the high school counselor who doubted her, but most of all to herself.
Standing on her mother's lessons, the support she received from faculty, and a renewed sense of self and community, Hastings is more confident than ever that everything works out. "It may sound cliche, but when you're in the thick of it, it can feel like it will never end. But even if it doesn't work out how you think, it will all resolve itself."
Click here to view a complete listing of this semester's notable graduates.
By Whitney Stovall
-PVAMU-