Immunologist Minor a major contributor to Animal Science program

Try as she might, Radiah C. Minor, Ph.D. can’t recall a time when she wasn’t enthralled with science.

As a child, she converted the family tub into a laboratory during bath time, creating potions of shampoos and conditioners and such. When birthdays rolled around, she asked for microscopes and build-your-own project kits from RadioShack.

“I even took my mom’s perfume and my dad’s cologne and mixed them together,” says Minor, now a professor of immunology at N.C. A&T. “They never yelled at me and said, ‘Stop doing that! You are wasting things!’ ”

When her mother enrolled in a geology class at a community college in Boston, daughter delighted in tagging along.

“She hated it and I loved it,” Minor says with a chuckle. “I remember the professor giving me some rocks to bring home. Being on the college campus with my mother – it was something that I could see myself doing.”

Minor especially loved meandering through the campuses of Harvard University and Radcliffe College on their walks home after class.

“I remember thinking, ‘I want to be here.’ So working at A&T just seems a natural thing to do. I get to do science, I get to teach. I get to ask questions. I never want to stop learning. What’s a better place to do that then on a college campus?”

Indeed, Minor would become the only member of her family to graduate from college when in 1996 she earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Florida A&M University, an HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in Tallahassee. Then she returned home for a year and worked two jobs to save money for graduate school. “I knew I wanted to go,” she says, “but I didn’t know how to get there.”

One day she received an unexpected call from an associate dean of the graduate school at Meharry Medical College asking if she’d like to attend the private HBCU in Nashville. Unbeknownst to Minor, her name had been placed on a feeder list. The dean even offered her a stipend.

“I told my mother, and she started jumping up and down,” recalls Minor, who needed little convincing. She headed off to Nashville and earned a Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology in 2005.

Postdoctoral fellowships at Duke University Medical Center and The National Institutes of Health lured Minor to North Carolina and kept her in the Triangle during the years that followed.

Then A&T came calling in 2008 — and she’s never looked back.

“At predominantly white institutions, sometimes minorities feel that ,if we don’t know how to do something, we are ‘less than,’ when really we just need experience and exposure,” she explains.

“Where I belong is helping the newer generations of students understand their worth and expose them to things that I didn’t have exposure to when I was an undergrad and didn’t know what questions to ask.”

Training the next generation of scientists

These days Minor shares her love of learning with students in A&T’s Department of Animal Sciences, teaching and overseeing research on whether Moringa can be used as a nutritional supplement to improve the health and growth of piglets. The Moringa oleifera tree is packed with vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and antioxidant compounds that promote health in humans and several livestock species.

Minor hopes to add valuable insights to research involving pigs, which is lacking. Piglets are born without immunity and often suffer from diarrhea when weaned.

“We know Moringa is an antioxidant and an anti-inflammatory. We were interested in feeding the Moringa to piglets to see if it improves their immune systems,” she says.

“The goal ultimately is to find a supplement that would be useful for pigs, because piglet health is important for swine production. Pigs are also good models for humans, so some of the things that we find might be helpful to humans.”

Several of Minor’s lab students spent Thursday mornings this summer at the N.C. A&T University Farm, monitoring 30 piglets in the swine unit nursery. Separated into six pens containing five piglets each, half of the animals received a feed formulation containing Moringa developed by Uchenna Anele, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department and a collaborator on the project. The other half ate a standard diet.

Under the tutelage of Andrea Gentry-Apple, Ph.D., another collaborator, the students collected data on feed intake and weight gain, and learned how to take stool and blood samples to evaluate immune response.

“The biggest concern was they wouldn’t eat it, so Dr. Anele put molasses in it,” Gentry-Apple explains. “Moringa doesn’t taste all that great. People say pigs will eat anything, but actually pigs are pretty picky eaters. But if you make it sweet enough, they will eat just about anything.”

Jessica Carter, a graduate student majoring in agriculture and environmental systems with a concentration in animal health, leads the student team. She earned an undergraduate degree in biology from UNC-Chapel Hill and plans to become a veterinarian one day.

“It’s given me a lot of opportunities to do more hands-on research, an experience I haven’t gotten before,” she says. “I am seeing that other side of veterinary medicine. I just realize there is so much that I can do with a degree in animal science beyond working with just dogs and cats.”

If not for Minor, Carter likely wouldn’t be at A&T today. After finishing at UNC, her younger sister suggested contacting the professor for advice on next steps.

“My sister was at A&T at the time and had gone to one of Dr. Minor’s Girls in Science camps when she was in middle school,” Carter recalls. “Honestly, I don’t think I would be where I am if I hadn’t reached out to her.”

Carter appreciates the opportunity to train with Minor and Gentry-Apple, the coordinator of veterinary education at A&T and the department’s clinical associate veterinarian. The two women actually go way back: As an undergraduate, Gentry-Apple studied with Minor during the latter’s first years on faculty at A&T. Gentry-Apple then went on to vet school at N.C. State.

“I am seeing these women who look like me and they are in positions that I want to be in. It’s encouraging,” Carter says. “Dr. Minor and Dr. Gentry-Apple are really good at helping me see the possibilities if I keep working hard. And they love helping people get to where they want to be. I’ve seen that first-hand.”

A safe space to learn — and fail

Watching students like Carter learn new skills and build confidence helps keep her professors deeply engaged in their work.

“A lot of times students come in very nervous when we are collecting blood,” says Gentry-Apple, who worked side-by-side with the students at the farm every Thursday morning.

“When they feel more comfortable, they start to say, ‘I can do this.’  And I say, ‘Yes! You can.’ To see their confidence build is the main reason we continue to work as hard as we do. It’s the students that keep a lot of us going.”

A recipient of the UNC Board of Governors 2018 Excellence in Teaching Award, Minor focuses on helping students develop the critical thinking skills they need to succeed.

“I am training scientists. I want you to think like a scientist, ask questions like a scientist, problem solve like a scientist and make connections like a scientist. If you think like a scientist, you are not just applying that to science, you are applying that to every aspect of life.”

In one of her classes, Minor requires students to write a one-page reflection on what they learned about themselves during the semester. They often tell her they didn’t like making presentations in front of their peers, but doing so helped them face their fears.

“We talk a lot in my classes about facing your fears. Failure is an option. The only way to get better at something is to do it,” she says.

Recently Minor had to face down her own fears when deciding whether to put her name in the hat for the job of Animal Sciences’ department head.

“Honestly, I talked myself in and out of applying for this job several times,” she recalls. “But I had some people encouraging me, and I thought, ‘What’s the worst that can happen? You try and don’t get it? You tell your students all the time to face their fears; you need to take your own advice.’ ”

Minor took over as department head in July and began moving into her new office in Webb Hall. A smile spreads across her face when she speaks about the future of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences’ largest department. 

Her mind seemingly moves a mile a minute when she ponders the possibilities aloud: addressing inefficiencies to ease faculty workload, celebrating Ph.D. students with a white coat ceremony, improving attendance at dissertation defenses to raise the visibility of student research and increasing online offerings, to name a few.

“I want to do a good job — for myself, for the department, for the students, for the dean. I want to ‘do good’ by all of them.”

Gentry-Apple feels confident that her colleague will succeed.

“I think it was a great move on the part of A&T’s leadership — she’s a breath of fresh air,” Gentry-Apple says.  “She wants everyone to be working on the same page as a team. As fast as this department is growing, having a leader at the forefront to organize and steer the ship is absolutely necessary.”