Top teams honored at 2026 TEES Annual Research Conference

The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) Annual Research Conference (TARC) serves as a hub for collaborative research partnerships among Texas institutions. The 2026 seed-fund winning teams’ collaborative spirits are fueling progress across disaster resilience, water quality, rural health care, cybersecurity, lunar exploration and sustainable energy infrastructure. Their projects demonstrate bridge expertise and perspectives in an effort to solve the world’s most complex engineering challenges.

Bridging gaps in disaster preparedness

With roadways submerged and neighborhoods cut off, recent flood events have underscored the importance of robust transportation resilience in Texas. In response, team Flood-TRIP proposed “Transportation Preparedness Gap for Flood Resilience.” Their project aims to close the gap between emergency planning and reality using a Geographic Information System, network analysis and artificial intelligence to compare actual road closures and disruptions with planned evacuation strategies.

“The project will establish a framework for translating observed system failures into future preparedness improvement priorities,” said principal investigator Euijin Yang from Sam Houston State University. “This approach can help local governments, transportation agencies and emergency managers better understand where limited resources should be invested, such as road network redundancy, drainage improvements, bridge access protection, emergency access corridors or other targeted infrastructure upgrades to proactively mitigate the impact of flooding.”

Team Flood-TRIP is comprised of Yang (Sam Houston), Calvin Clark (Texas A&M University-Kingsville), Shihao Huang (Tarleton State University) and Wencheng Jin (Texas A&M University).

Real-time water quality for all

Across Texas, access to clean water is critical for communities, agriculture or industry. Traditional water testing is often costly and slow. Enter team Aqua-X, led by principal investigator Tonoy Das from Texas A&M-Kingsville. Their project, “SMART Instant Water-Quality,” looks to develop a smartphone-integrated microfluidic platform for detecting contaminants in real time, including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, microbial pathogens and heavy metals.

“The proposed technology has potential to improve rapid water quality assessment, expand access to environmental monitoring in resource-limited settings, support agricultural and industrial water management and strengthen public health protection through decentralized and real-time sensing capabilities,” said Das.

Team Aqua-X is comprised of Das, Alexandru Herescu (Tarleton), Thang Nguyen (Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi) and Debjyoti Banerjee (Texas A&M).

Innovative health care solutions for rural Texas

Digital health tools often miss rural communities with limited connectivity. Team OASIS’s project, “Offline AI System for Intelligent Support (OASIS),” proposes an AI health care assistant that works offline with goals of streamlining access to safe, clinician-reviewed guidance, even during emergencies. 

“OASIS will not replace physicians, nurses or clinical judgment. Instead, it will support health education, symptom navigation, appointment preparation, referral guidance, documentation and emergency escalation,” said Rezwana. “By keeping processing local, OASIS will protect privacy and remain usable during outages or emergencies, while supporting communities with limited transportation, internet access and clinical staffing.”

Team OASIS led by principal investigator Saki Rezwana (Tarleton) and comprised of Anika Rimu (East Texas A&M University), Haitham Adarbah (Texas A&M-Kingsville) and Jabia Mostofa Chowdhury (Texas A&M University-Texarkana).

Team MiRehab and their project “An Intelligent TeleRehabilitation System for Rural Care Patients,” tackles another rural health challenge: accessible rehabilitation. MiRehab is looking to create a tele-rehab system that uses computer vision and wearable haptic devices for real-time feedback. The system wouldn’t just flag errors; it would help with physical correction.

“Studies have shown that non-adherence in home rehabilitation can be as high as 50%. Patients may improve in the clinic, but at home, they lose real-time supervision and movement correction,” said principal investigator Shaochen Huang from Texas Woman’s University. “Current digital rehabilitation tools use cameras and avatars to provide prescribed guidance. However, they are not tailored to the individual patient and are limited in providing effective feedback. To address these major limitations, we propose MiRehab, which combines computer vision with wearable haptic feedback.”

Additional team members include Mohammad Alsmirat (East Texas A&M), Shaif Chowdhury (Texas A&M-Kingsville) and Haitham Abu Ghazaleh (Tarleton).

Toward secure systems and sustainable infrastructure

Team AONIX is tackling security risks of agentic AI by developing a multi-tiered defense framework. Led by five collaborators from East Texas A&M, Texas A&M-Kingsville, Lamar University and Sam Houston, the project is not only advancing technical solutions but also workforce training in cybersecurity.

Team FORTRESS is enhancing resilience in smart transportation systems with a testbed that will integrate reliability, cybersecurity and AI robustness testing — thanks to team members at Tarleton, Texas A&M International University and Texas A&M-Texarkana.

Team Prime is taking collaboration to lunar heights, with partners from Texas A&M International, Texas A&M, Texas A&M-Kingsville and Prairie View A&M University designing an autonomous builder-bot to construct and test regolith infrastructure for lunar missions — a multidisciplinary blend of robotics, materials science and intelligent systems.

The Resilience Architects — comprised of members from Tarleton, Texas A&M, Texas A&M-Texarkana and TEES — addressed the sustainability of Texas’ rapidly growing data center industry. Their proposed AI-enabled framework will model and test critical infrastructure interactions with digital twins and attack scenario libraries supporting decision-makers statewide.

Collaboration at the core

This year’s TARC winners worked to exemplify the conference’s collaborative principles. Each project leverages expertise from across Texas A&M University System universities and partners, uniting diverse fields from disaster analysis to biosensing. 

“This conference offers a special chance for representatives across all TEES divisions to connect, share insights and inspire new collaborations,” said Cindy Lawley, Texas A&M Engineering associate agency director for Workforce Development and Regional Divisions.  “Together, we’re driving the TEES broader mission: translating research into practical solutions, strengthening education and workforce pipelines, fostering interdisciplinary efforts and building bridges between industry, academic institutions and the wider community.”

For detailed summaries of all winning projects and full team listings, visit 2026 TARC Collaborations.