Graham Named FameLab National Finalist

Heather Graham was recently named one of ten U.S. finalists in the international FameLab competition. Run by the U.K.-based Cheltenham Science Festival in cooperation with NASA, the event showcases the science communication skills of graduate students and early-career scientists. For more information about FameLab, click here.

CarbonEARTH STEM Symposium Held April 5

CarbonEARTH hosted a special STEM symposium, "The Changing Ecosystem of Science Communication," on Thursday, April 5 from 2:00 to 5:30pm in the Stuckeman Family Building on the University Park Campus. The event featured professional science communicators and faculty from Penn State and the University of Minnesota, including:

Jonathan Foley
Director, Institute on the Environment
University of Minnesota

Matthew Hurteau
Director, Earth System Ecology Lab
Penn State

Denice Wardrop
Assistant Director, Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment (PSIEE)
Penn State

Kevin Zelnio
Freelance science writer, blogger, and science communication consultant

More information here.

CarbonEARTH Fellows and Teacher Awarded Grant

CarbonEARTH teacher Laura Warner, fellow Tracy Conklin, and alum Abbey Tyrna were awarded a Toshiba America Foundation grant for a project entitled "Schoolyard Explorers." The grant provides nearly $1000 for classroom materials for the ecological study of the schoolyard at North Lincoln Hill Elementary in Philipsburg, PA. Since March, North Lincoln Hill students have been studying life in the schoolyard, starting with birds and plants. As spring progresses, students will construct their own field guide and familiarize themselves with the characteristics and adaptations of plants and animals, the relationships between nonliving and living elements in the schoolyard, and schoolyard food webs. With a large building addition planned for North Lincoln next year, students are interested to see if the schoolyard ecology will change as future classes follow in their footsteps with the project.

Magill Awarded First Place at Student Symposium

Clayton Magill was awarded first place for the Meteorology and Climate session at Penn State's 2012 Environmental Chemistry Student Symposium (ECSS) for his talk, "High-resolution reconstruction of early human habitats at FLK Zinjanthropus, Olduvai Gorge, using lipid biomarker and isotope signatures." The goal of the student run symposium is to foster interactions between graduate and undergraduate scientists and engineers engaged in environmentally relevant research.

Clayton Magill to Speak at Columbia Symposium

Columbia University’s Earth Institute has invited CarbonEARTH fellow Clayton Magill to speak during an upcoming Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory symposium April 19-20. The event -- titled Did Climate Change Shape Human Evolution? -- features presentations from leading scientists on the latest evidence for climate and faunal change in East Africa over the last five million years and how these changes may have influenced the evolution of African mammals, including our human ancestors.

Alejandro Suarez Wins First at Graduate Expo

CarbonEARTH fellow Alejandro Suarez took first place honors in the Physical Sciences and Mathematics category of the 2012 Penn State Graduate Exhibition. Suarez's poster, titled "Computationally Searching for Magnetism in Graphene," was one of several hundred exhibition entries. Since 1986, the Graduate Exhibition has showcased Penn State graduate research across all campuses, with special emphasis on communicating research to lay audiences.

CarbonEARTH Fellows Participate in Graduate Expo

Nine CarbonEARTH fellows -- Mike Szedlmayer, Jeff Law, Ian Grettenberger, Heather Graham, Tracy Conklin, Jon Swierk, Carla Rosenberg, Clay Magill, and Alejandro Suarez -- competed in Penn State's 2012 Penn State Graduate Exhibition. CarbonEARTH fellow Luke Powell and administrator Seth Wilberding served as exhibition judges. Since 1986, the Graduate Exhibition has featured Penn State graduate research across all campuses to both award exceptional work and give students an opportunity to communicate this work to lay audiences.

Shaunna Barnhart Publishes Paper

Shaunna Barnhart has published a paper in the Journal of Sustainability Education titled "Teaching Sustainability across Scale and Culture: Biogas in Context." Teaching sustainability invariably involves teaching about energy – its use, its sources, its environmental impacts, and its social implications. This paper explores how one renewable energy alternative – biogas – is adapted and applied across scale and culture. By comparing biogas application in Nepal, the United States, and Sweden, we gain insight into how one technology is adapted across diverse needs and from household to regional scales in the pursuit of more sustainable energy practices. Such an exercise can be an asset in the classroom to teach students about the importance and relevance of place-based solutions that address diverse cultural and economic realities. For the full article text, please click here.

March 20, 2012

Fellows selected for NSF/AAAS Poster Session

CarbonEARTH Fellows Heather Graham, Shaunna Barnhart, and Tracy Conklin were among 32 NSF GK-12 graduate students selected to present at a March NSF/AAAS-sponsored poster session. Held the opening day of the 2012 GK-12 Conference, the session highlights cutting-edge research and its classroom application by GK-12 Fellows.

February 15, 2012

Field Trip to Penn State's Breazeale Reactor

Tyler Engstrom and CarbonEARTH teacher Amy Yarrison's second grade class recently visited the Breazeale Reactor on Penn State's University Park campus. This nuclear facility, which is used only for research and does not generate power for the University, is the oldest continuously operating facility of its kind in the United States. While there, Tyler and Amy's students learned about fission and properties of atoms through interactive games.

February 15, 2012

Philipsburg-Osceola Students Visit Penn State Engineering Competition

CarbonEARTH Fellow Mike Szedlmayer and Teacher Randy Edelman brought 53 Philipsburg-Osceola Junior High students to Penn State's University Park campus February 11 to watch the University's annual Regional Rube Goldberg Machine Contest. Goldberg, an early 20th century American artist and inventor, was renowned for his drawings depicting overly-complex machines designed to perform simple tasks. This year’s challenge, held at Penn State's Nittany Lion Inn, was to design and build a machine that inflates a balloon and pops it in 20 or more steps. Students will later design their own Rube Goldberg machines in Edelman's Technology and Design course.

February 11, 2012

Heather Graham Awarded Fellowship

Heather Graham, CarbonEARTH Fellow and PhD Candidate in Geosciences, was recently selected an appointment as a Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC)/Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship. Heather will work on her project, titled Plant Molecular and Isotopic Indicators of Light Environment: A new Approach to Proxies for Canopied Ecosystems of the Past, in conjunction with researchers at the National Museum of Natural History(NMNH) and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI).

February 8, 2012

Eighth Grade Philipsburg-Osceola Students Build and Test Compression Strength of Wooden Towers

CarbonEARTH Fellow Mike Szedlmayer and Philipsburg-Osceola physical technology teacher Cory Wood recently led students in a project to test stress, force and compression strength of wooden towers. Eighth grade students designed and built balsa wood towers and then applied weight to test their load-bearing thresholds. The project was featured in the January 6 issue of the Philipsburg Journal. For more information, visit http://www.pomounties.org/5702092133120873/blank/browse.asp?a=383&BMDRN=...

January 20, 2012



Harrisburg Exposition Scheduled for June 2, 2012

The 2012 Harrisburg CarbonEARTH Exhibition will be held Saturday, June 2, 2012 at the Whitaker Center in downtown Harrisburg. The event will feature select STEM-related projects and experiments CarbonEARTH Fellows, teachers, and their students have completed since the beginning of the school year. Come join us at the Whitaker Center's Kunkel Gallery from 11:00am to 2.30pm. Attendance is free and open to the public.

January 20, 2012

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellows in K-12 Education Program (GK-12) provides funding to graduate students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines to acquire additional skills that will broadly prepare them for professional and scientific careers in the 21st century.

NSF developed the GK-12 program recognizing that, in addition to being competent researchers, STEM graduate students must be able to communicate science and research to a variety of audiences. As the graduate students bring their cutting-edge research and practice into the K-12 classroom, they gain these skills which enable them to explain science to people of all ages, ranging from students to teachers. The graduate students also inspire transformation in the K-12 formal and informal learning environments and stimulate interest in science and engineering among students and teachers. NSF understands that STEM graduate students can contribute to the national effort to advance scientific knowledge through partnerships with K-12 communities.

NSF has funded over 200 projects in more than 140 different universities throughout the United States and Puerto Rico, since the Program's inception in 1999.