Education & Outreach
As part of an initiative to shine a light on the benefits of community college education, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Representative Ben Ray Luján toured Santa Fe Community College and it's new Trades and Advanced Technology Center.
Last fall, the STEM Advancement Program (STEMAP) Coordinators (including myself) began recruiting for this summer’s group of undergraduate summer researchers. We traveled 2,463 miles and 40 hours to visit 14 campuses to share information about our 2015 STEMAP program; see the map below. All that effort paid off!
Just after the start of the new year, NM EPSCoR welcomed 20 post-docs to the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge for an intensive three-day program designed to enhance the professional skills of post-doctoral scholars in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. NM EPSCoR brought experts from around the country to lead workshop sessions on meeting facilitation, communicating science, writing proposals, career planning, entrepreneurship, mentoring, and more. NM EPSCoR researcher Johanna Blake participated in this year's workshop; she kindly wrote about her experience.
The 2014 New Mexico Journal of Science, published by the New Mexico Academy of Science, is now available for public viewing. This year's Journal is subtitled "Water, Energy, and the Environment," and includes abstracts from participants in the 2014 NMAS Research Symposium.
Congratulations to our very own Selena Connealy! Last month she was named the recipient of the New Mexico Science Teacher Association's (NMSTA) 2014 Service to Science Award! She recieved her award during the NMSTA general meeting at the Soar to Greater Heights NMSTA/NMCTM,EEANM conference in Albuquerque on November 15th at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.
NM EPSCoR and the New Mexico Academy of Science welcomed over 130 faculty, students, researchers, educators and community members at the Hyatt Downtown Albuquerque on November 1st.
Our Diversity Coordinator, Chelsea Chee, reports on the SACNAS National Conference. Chelsea attended with three NM EPSCoR STEMAP students, and helped organize and run an Education, Outreach, and Diversity exhibit booth with several EPSCoR jurisdictions.
Our very own Education and Outreach Coordinator, Selena Connealy, wrote a blog for the website InformalScience.org, an online community and collection of informal STEM learning projects, evaluation, and research resources. The blog focuses on the NM EPSCoR–funded Informal Science Education Network. Read an excerpt here.
Energy is everywhere! Science teachers and their students wrestle with energy concepts at nearly every grade level. The Framework for K-12 Science Education (NRC, 2012) provide a foundation for K-12 teaching and learning about energy as a crosscutting concept across the disciplines. The New Mexico Informal Science Education Network (NM ISE Net) educators used the Framework for the first Energize New Mexico Teacher Institute, held in Albuquerque on June 9-13, 2014.
During the month of July 2014, the NM EPSCoR Uranium Transport and Site Remediation component team mentored three minority undergraduate students at UNM by providing hands on experience on a geochemical extraction experiment of mine waste to understand desorption chemical concentrations and kinetics.