Category: Education & Outreach

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.

New Mexico EPSCoR is proud to partner with smaller colleges around the state in order to provide research opportunities to students at non-research schools. Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, NM is a new participant in the WC-WAVE Undergraduate Visualization and Modeling Network (UVMN) program.

STEMAP ended last week in celebration of 11 undergraduate students’ summer research with 50+ people at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge. Students spent eight weeks working with NM EPSCOR researchers at UNM, NMT, and NMSU to gain valuable, in-the-field research experience their current colleges do not provide. It all culminated in a morning full of presentations to fellow researchers, faculty, NM EPSCoR staff, friends, and family.

Fifteen students and five faculty researchers from New Mexico Tech, New Mexico Highlands University, and Eastern New Mexico University congregated at the New Mexico Tech Environmental Engineering Laboratory, June 9 – 11 to learn the basics of membrane fabrication and characterization. The first in a series of technical workshops, this three-day intensive workshop was designed to establish and nurture a vibrant research infrastructure in New Mexico for osmotic power development.

Happy Summer! Diversity has been the word here at NM EPSCoR’s office during the month of May. I am excited to share that our Diversity Team is in the midst of creating our very own Diversity Strategic Plan. Five diversity advocates from across the state joined the Diversity Team to focus and strategize NM EPSCoR’s diversity work. I will share this document with you when it is finalized on our Diversity page by the end of this month.