The recently announced Moise A. Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies is funding research projects for undergraduate and graduate students at NC State.
The Khayrallah Center is the center in the world outside of Lebanon that studies the Lebanese diaspora, which began more than 150 years ago and represents the millions of Lebanese who have settled all over the world.
The center will be offering research opportunities to students with skills in programing, graphic design, business management, data visualization and scripting.
In the next 10 years, the center hopes to double its endowment from $8.1 million to $16 million, as well as seek grants to double the amount of funds the center has access to annually in hopes to increase the number of graduate students, faculty and additional research the center can sustain, said Akram Khater, the director of the Khayrallah Center.
The center will work on developments ranging anywhere from smaller research projects to national endeavors, such as training volunteers throughout the U.S. to crowdsource the national collection of oral histories, according to Khater.
The center’s current endowment funds research projects such as the digital migration game, which uses interactive technology to engage young adults in some of the issues that come from people migrating out of their native homelands, according to Khater.
The game allows users to immerse themselves in the decision-making process of a person living through a period of immigration, Khater said.
NC State will create an interdisciplinary team to work together on this project.
The game will require history majors to script the game, graphic designers to design the game environment and characters, computer programmers, business majors to create a business model and communication majors to help market the game.
The center is looking to provide students with paid employment or unpaid internships. Research has become essential for students going into the job market and furthering their education, according to Khater.
“The staffing is going to be heavily dependent on students because we think that undergraduates have a need for research experience,” Khater said.
Khater said the center plans to hire primarily from NC State students.
“From our point of view it is absolutely essential because you have so many talents amongst undergraduate student,” Khater said.
Another project currently in the works aims to collect census data to build an interactive digital database that shows who immigrants were, where they lived, how many children they had, who they married, how they moved, how they identify themselves, what kind of work they did and if the numbers in these categories have increased or decreased over time, according to Khater.
The database will be the most comprehensive data visualization project that the center has worked on. The center will take an excel database of more than 100,000 records and create a web-based interactive map.
Khater said the project will need computer programming students and graphic design students and currently has an international studies major heading it.
“It will always be an interdisciplinary approach,” Khater said.
Moise A. Khayrallah and his wife, Vera Khayrallah, donated $8.1 million donation to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the largest donation in the college’s history, to create the Moise A. Khayrallah Center, the first endowed center at NC State.
Caroline Muglia, social media manager of the Khayrallah Center and NC State alumna, became involved in the Khayrallah program in 2010.
According to Muglia, the program has produced research that has shed light on and upheld the significance of the immigration population and its contribution in this country.
The program showed what an incredible contribution such a small community can make to the state in a century, Muglia said.
