FSU Wins the Prestigious Department of Defense Nunn-Perry Award for Partnership in the Mentor Protégé Program

Fayetteville State University (FSU) wins the prestigious Department of Defense (DOD) Nunn-Perry Award for partnership in the MPP. Being selected as an esteemed Nunn-Perry Award winning institution is a prestigious achievement for FSU. The DOD Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP) recently awarded Booz Allen and Masego a 2020 Nunn-Perry Award for collaboration and impactful innovation under the DOD Mentor Protege Program (MPP) and development of the Masego Advanced Demographic Attribution (ADA) Data as a Service capability, where unclassified human geography data is integrated through a cloud-based analytics platform to support national security and warfighter decision-making. Fayetteville State University (FSU) provided critical support in partnership with Booz Allen and Masego to enable ADA Data through data collection, processing, and automation activities between 2018 and 2021, with student skills in computer science, geography, history, and political science. Two of the FSU student team leads were hired by Masego and have continued to support the project beyond graduation.

Dr. Sambit Bhattacharya, Professor of Computer Science at FSU and Director of the Intelligent Systems Lab (ISL) served as the Principal Investigator of the MPP contract from Booz Allen. He recruited students for the project from different majors such as Computer Science, Geography, History, and MIS. The ISL provided on-site computational resources including dedicated and special-purpose hardware and software which were crucial to FSU's critical support in this partnership. According to Dr. Bhattacharya participation in the MPP created opportunities for real-world projects that use knowledge and skills from multiple disciplines, and it provided an excellent project-based learning approach for students that prepared them for entering the workforce.