Walter Cronkite School Professor Gregg Zachary -- along with another professor from ASU and a professor from Concordia University in Canada -- received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the economic impact of computer technology in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Royal Coffee Bar is opening a new shop in Heritage Square Park's historic carriage house after being forced to close its Phoenix Public Market location in 2012. Royal has two other shops at the Biltmore Fashion Park and plans to expand to Tempe and North Scottsdale in 2014.

Recent College of Nursing and Health Innovation graduate Justin Crawford is a single father and Army veteran. He works at the Phoenix VA Health Care System and teaches about violence prevention.

Painter and photographer Travis Fields has grand visions for the arts community in Phoenix. He founded a Facebook group called Arizona Artists to give information to artists about the business side of their industry.

The second annual Phoenix Festival of the Arts was held Friday to Sunday at Margaret T. Hance Park, giving local artists another opportunity to come together and work on the large-scale murals that are a centerpiece of the three-day festival. For this year’s festival, Medina said two murals would be completed with the help of 120 local artists. While one mural was worked on just as it was the previous year, the other had a more direct theme.