DEVON PARFAIT IS GROUNDED. Not in a bad way. As the future chief of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band of Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, he wants to protect his people’s land. His tribes live among the bayous of southern Louisiana. Each year 30 square miles of their fragile ecosystem wash away due to habitat destruction caused by hurricanes and other forces.
Worse, his Native communities lose land at twice the rate of other low-lying areas.
And that’s a discovery he made. “It had never been studied before,” says Parfait, who will be a senior at Williams College in Massachusetts. “I proved through my own scientific research that Native Americans are being disproportionately affected by coastal land loss,” adds the geosciences major. “To produce something my tribes can use to advocate for themselves when talking about coastal land loss was so powerful to me. There are so many ways social justice interacts with geosciences.”
“To be able to advocate for my tribe using my voice was an incredible feeling,” Parfait says. “That’s what made me want to pursue my education.”
The field focuses on geology and includes related fields such as meteorology and oceanography. Parfait loves this discipline because, he says, “the Earth itself is such an interdisciplinary subject — places, people, they’re all interconnected.”
He plans to seek a policy-making position to advocate for his tribe. When he saw the results of his research, Parfait contacted the office of Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy. They talked on the phone. As a result, Parfait will accompany Cassidy on a visit to tribal communities. He will intern in the senator’s office after graduating and may run for state representative.
“I draw my passion from people,” says Parfait. He grew up in Dulac on the bayou where his grandfather had a shrimp boat. His family had to move farther north in Louisiana when Hurricane Rita destroyed their home in 2005. “I’m mostly focused on coastal land loss and the tribes, but if I can be a state representative, I’ll be doing something for my tribes that will also benefit all Louisiana’s people,” he says.
Parfait wasn’t always as focused as he is now. He admits he struggled in high school and says he avoided homework. After graduating he took a semester off. “That was the best thing I could have done because I had no idea what I wanted to do,” he recalls. After three semesters in a community college, he went to a geosciences conference in Seattle where he met Williams students and their geosciences professor.
A life-changing moment came when Parfait had the opportunity to go on stage to speak on behalf of his tribe. “To be able to advocate for my tribe using my voice was an incredible feeling,” he says. “That’s what made me want to pursue my education.”
But when he applied to Williams, he was rejected. Unwilling to give up, Parfait participated in Williams-Mystic, a semester-long program that included a 10-day field seminar at sea. Alone on bow watch one night, he felt awed by the Milky Way. “I remember this absolute feeling of love and joy. Experiences and emotions rushed through me. I just cried my eyes out,” he recalls. His time at sea changed his life. Refusing to give up, he applied to Williams again and was accepted.
Today Parfait is deepening his tribal connections. He is being tutored by the tribes’ current chief. After his family moved away from tribe members, his grandfather always had a tepee in their backyard. “He was a conduit of the culture, always doing Native crafts — making a headdress, medicine bags, and walking sticks.” He credits his mother with instilling in him respect, kindness, and love for others.
Parfait admits there were times he wanted to give up, but he says, “I thought about my tribe and my community and the things they go through. Even now in college, that’s my biggest driver.”
And it is driving toward a path of helping his tribes and the wider community. “I want to do things to benefit my family, my home, and the place and people I love,” Parfait says. “When I think about what legacy I want to leave behind, I want it to be a legacy of helping people.”
—George Spencer
The homelands of the Grand Caillou/Dulac Band tribal people, who have lived along the Louisiana coast for centuries, are so imperiled that a football field of land area is lost every 100 minutes.
WHEN VICTOR “SALSA” LOPEZ was a high school junior in Houston, he had two competing summer internships to consider. One was a NASA Pathways Internship at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. The other was helping to produce a video for an emerging local rapper. At age 16, Lopez was all about the video shoot. But the project fell apart, and fortunately, NASA was still an option. At Goddard he worked on research trying to predict landslides and earthquakes — an experience that fundamentally shifted his future path. He realized that while studying math and science may not always be fun, STEM studies can help save lives.
Lopez became enthralled with space. He thought the best major for him would be aerospace engineering, and the best place for that would be the Air Force Academy. This would mean a huge geographic move. Lopez is a proud Tejano — a sixth-generation Texan with Native American and Spanish ancestry. His family has lived in Texas since it was a Spanish colony, then part of Mexico, then the independent Republic of Texas, finally joining the Union in 1845. When Lopez arrived at the Academy with those strong cultural roots, he experienced what he describes as a bit of a culture shock. “I saw how I was different,” he says, “but it allowed me to learn and grow.”
He found incredible opportunities at the Academy, where he had astronauts for teachers and mentors. He focused mainly on engineering, designing, and building, but also took advantage of the chance to learn to fly, and liked it.
As a dedicated mentor, Lopez is also passionate about pushing the envelope of what is possible by growing a diversified talent pool and inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers.
Upon graduation, Lopez was selected for pilot training and logged over 2,000 combat hours as an MQ-9 Reaper pilot. But he always knew he would get back into engineering and wanted to prepare himself for that future job, whatever it may be. After pilot training, he started looking at graduate programs. Specifically, he wanted a program that integrates the various engineering disciplines. “Everything we use today is a system of systems, and everything connects and has to work together,” Lopez explains.
He found the ideal program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose faculty includes a number of retired Air Force pilots and engineers. In 2019, he earned his professional master’s in applied systems engineering. The timing of his next step, Lopez believes, is a proverbial case of the luck you can get when preparation meets opportunity.
In February 2019, a presidential executive order launched the American AI Initiative, the nation’s strategy on artificial intelligence. The Department of the Air Force (DAF) subsequently signed a monumental cooperative agreement with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to jointly create the DAF-MIT AI Accelerator, hosted at MIT. By April 2019, Lopez’s resume had been floating around for something different, but when the accelerator start-up team saw it, they thought he was the right person to join them.
Lopez became one of 11 active-duty airmen and four part-time reservists embedded on campus, something unprecedented. They represent 11 different roles, including intelligence and weather professionals, pilots, and data scientists. Their work is meant to benefit both the public and private sectors, and everything they do is transparent — anyone can learn about ongoing research and projects at aia.mit.edu.
“We want to advance what is possible with technologies and make sure we use them in a way that makes our citizens proud,” Lopez explains. His current project, Transferring Multi-Robot Learning to Virtual and Augmented Reality for Rapid Disaster Response, focuses on helping search-and-rescue teams find survivors in disaster situations.
As a dedicated mentor, Lopez is also passionate about pushing the envelope of what is possible by growing a diversified talent pool and inspiring the next generation of scientists and engineers. Diversity, he believes, helps you understand the equities that must be put into place to comprehend all the ethical and moral aspects. He says, “It requires going into underrepresented communities to dispel some of the misconceptions about the military and talk about some of the amazing technical changes that we need help with.”
Lopez says he is living his dream. “It’s all about how I can use math, science, and engineering to help people. My goal hasn’t changed since NASA,” he says. “I just change how I do it. Today it is this project. Tomorrow the Air Force may ask something else of me.”
—Ann S. Boor
“Tejano” or “Tejana” denotes a Texan of Mexican descent, often someone from south Texas with northern Mexican and Mestizo (European and Indigenous) ancestry. The term encompasses music, language, art, and cuisine (“Tex-Mex” is related but not synonymous).