Like A Good Neighbor State Farm is There-With $100,000

By: Majd Bostani

Science Leadership Academy has a reputation of caring about its’ engineering department. SLA made that boldly obvious when they hired one of the coolest people many high schoolers know. Mr. Kamal, SLA’s engineering teacher is the authority on futuristic technology and engineering! Mr. Kamal has some tremendous things on his resume, and that  helps him make SLA’s engineering department one of the best in the city.

Mr. Kamal holds both master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Before working for SLA, he owned a software company for twenty-five years and worked for General Electric as a spacecraft designer for eight years. That’s right, he designed the spacecraft for NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration! If that doesn’t make him sound like a great engineer, I don’t know what does!

Mr. Kamal and I specifically talked about the grants that SLA’s engineering department has received.

When asked about where his grants came from he proudly stated, “We received over two hundred thousand dollars from many major corporations over the past six months!” SLA Engineering’s largest grant came from State Farm for about one hundred thousand dollars. Among other grants were forty-five thousand dollar grants from Braskem, a Brazilian petrochemical company, as well as Axalta Coating Systems, a performance automotive paint company. SLA Engineering also received grants from the United States Navy, Boeing Aircraft Company, Lowe’s, and Dow Chemical.

“That money is funding numerous projects that SLA Engineering is working on,” Mr. Kamal stated. “Among those projects are an engineering makerspace, a metal machine shop, and funding for our Robotics team,”

SLA’s Robotics Team is once again competing at the FIRST Robotics Competitions.

“It takes a lot of dedication to build a winning robotics team,” Mr Kamal added. “With our grant, we hope to be able to buy better tools for our team to build robots with,” Mr. Kamal reassured.
I, on behalf of SLAMedia congratulate Mr. Kamal and the entire SLA Engineering and Robotics Team on this grant.