A new fellowship centered on the University's HSI designation has a dual purpose: to help the fellows develop leadership skills and – through the fellows' work – to expand the UA's capacity to serve Hispanic students. "One of the interesting things about the HSI designation is that it really is what the University wants to make of it," says Marla Franco, assistant vice provost for HSI initiatives. The first cohort of 10 fellows will spend the spring semester working on three HSI-related projects.

In addition to the strategic plan, the UA will submit its operational and financial review for FY 2019 and will ask ABOR to approve its 2019 capital development plan, which includes four new building projects. One is the Grand Challenges Research Building, a $150 million interdisciplinary research facility.

Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, Lo Que Pasa will not be published next week. We wish all UA employees and their families a safe, happy and delicious Thanksgiving!

The Green Fund is taking applications for its annual grants through Jan. 28. With large budgets and timelines of up to three years, many of the projects that receive funding involve faculty and staff leading the projects with students. One such project, run by entomology professor Goggy Davidowitz, raises edible mealworms using spent beer-brewing grains. "The Green Fund has an important role at the University in that it gives students the opportunity to do hands-on sustainability," Davidowitz says. "It supports oddball thinking, or nonstandard ways of doing things."

Hsinchun Chen might have your credit card data, and he's probably had it for years. The Regents' Professor of Management Information Systems is trying to understand the way hackers and cyberterrorists work so that – someday – it's far harder for them to get your credit card data. Chen has built a notable career on artificial intelligence and is one of the most published and cited MIS scholars in the world. "I'm not interested in creating simple apps. Those fulfill certain basic social functions," Chen says. "Instead, I want to use data and technology for large social solutions."

Gökçe Günel, an assistant professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, writes about her time in Ghana on a ship that provides nearly a quarter of the country's electricity. "The powership has been key in alleviating the persistent electric power outages that Ghanaians had been experiencing," Günel writes in this Field Notes guest column. During the most recent episode, which occurred between 2012 and 2015, "power for businesses and homes would be out for 24 hours, then back on for only 12 hours."

The new head of 4-H youth development in Arizona aims to take the statewide program beyond its agricultural roots. "We want to be the youth development program that people from across the UA campus turn to when they think about doing youth outreach," says Jeremy Elliott-Engel, who took the post in September. "When other departments want to do youth work, we hope they would think about 4-H as their delivery mode."

Congratulations to these recent honorees: Leigh Neumayer and James H. McClenathan, Department of Surgery; Lucy Ziurys, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Department of Astronomy; Donata Vercelli, Asthma and Airway Disease Research Center; Judith Su, College of Optical Sciences; Karen Francis-Begay, Government and Community Relations; Ken Marcus, Tech Parks Arizona; and staff members at Tech Parks Arizona and the Office of University Communications.

UA community members are invited to share their ideas about smarter policies, processes and approaches. "Sharing your ideas could impact thousands of faculty, staff and students and change the way we do business here at the University of Arizona," says Karen Williams, vice president for information strategy. She is leading a strategic plan initiative related to optimizing business processes, and is asking employees and students to use the UAVoice website to help identify priorities.

There are plenty of reasons employees might be feeling stressed this time of year. One way to help manage that stress might be attending Meditation Mondays, a free, guided meditation group, led by UA employees. "The mind is really adept at thinking about things that have already happened or things that haven't happened yet, but our minds are less trained to be able to hold our attention or awareness in the present moment, so what we do is designed to be gentle guidance for that," says meditation leader Leslie Langbert, executive director of the UA Center for Compassion Studies.