A young T&T na­tion­al’s demon­stra­tion of aca­d­e­m­ic ded­i­ca­tion and tenac­i­ty has led to him be­com­ing one of the first Afro-Caribbean doc­tor­al grad­u­ates at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty.

Jamell Da­con has now set his sights on open­ing the door­way for young lo­cals as­pir­ing to leave their mark in the fields of tech­nol­o­gy and en­gi­neer­ing.

Dur­ing a re­cent in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, Da­con ex­plained that he has al­ways been en­cour­aged by his loved ones to give it his all.

“I grew up with my aunt, my un­cle and my grand­moth­er. We were al­ways a fam­i­ly that has been goal ori­ent­ed and my grand­moth­er al­ways told me this quote and it was, ‘bloom wher­ev­er you are plant­ed, it doesn’t mat­ter the sit­u­a­tion, try your best to be suc­cess­ful’,” he said.

The guid­ing words have be­come the 27-year-old’s mantra in his aca­d­e­m­ic en­deav­ours ear­ly on as Da­con honed in on his gifts.

“I just al­ways liked to re­mem­ber num­bers so I start­ed to learn things like se­quenc­ing and pie when I was in pri­ma­ry school so these things were re­al­ly, re­al­ly easy to me. I lived in Clax­ton Bay and my un­cle al­ways used to say, if I saw a strange car I would al­ways re­mem­ber the li­cense plate. I al­ways was good at re­mem­ber­ing my friend’s birth­days and an­niver­saries and I’d re­mind my un­cle about dates,” he ex­plained.

The for­mer As­ja Boys’ Col­lege San Fer­nan­do stu­dent’s ex­cel­lence in both sport and aca­d­e­mics even­tu­al­ly broad­ened his as­pi­ra­tions as he would ace his SAT ex­am—which mea­sures a stu­dent’s readi­ness for col­lege—al­low­ing him to en­rol in Medgar Evar’s Col­lege in Brook­lyn, New York.

There new doors opened up for Da­con.

“I had an in­tern­ship from NASA, then I did a sum­mer re­search pro­gramme dur­ing my third year in school and I had to do some­thing with com­put­er sci­ence and when I came back af­ter do­ing that pro­gramme, I talked to my ad­vis­er and be­gan a Com­put­er Sci­ence As­so­ciates De­gree while do­ing a Bach­e­lors in Math­e­mat­ics,” he ex­plained.

The young man from Clax­ton Bay would earn his Mas­ter’s De­gree and Doc­tor­al de­grees in Com­put­er Sci­ence and En­gi­neer­ing from the Michi­gan Sate Uni­ver­si­ty.

“I grad­u­at­ed in May of 2023 as one of the few black stu­dents to get a doc­tor­al de­gree, the first Trin­bag­on­ian and first Afro-Caribbean to grad­u­ate in the de­part­ment’s his­to­ry. The school was es­tab­lished in 1855, so it made waves.”

Da­con, who is now an As­sis­tant Pro­fes­sor in Com­put­er Sci­ence wants to pay it for­ward.

“What I would like to do is write a cou­ple grants to gov­ern­ment agen­cies here to get grant mon­ey to help put stu­dents through school here where we can do projects that af­fect cer­tain com­mu­ni­ties that ad­dress dif­fer­ent types of bi­as­es in AI such as gen­der bias and racial bias,” he said.

Da­con be­lieves his stud­ies on ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence can bridge gaps as it re­lates par­tic­u­lar­ly to com­mu­ni­ca­tion.