Susan Murabana is working to bring astronomy education to Africa through Global Hands-On Universe, a program founded by Berkeley Lab astronomer Carl Pennypacker.

For students who choose to return to Berkeley Lab, CSEE internship programs are often pivotal in deciding their futures. “We have seen these experiences literally change lives,” said CSEE director Susan Brady. “When teachers and students conduct authentic research with exceptional scientists using world-class facilities and equipment, they are introduced to a whole new world of possibilities.”

iCLEM – the Introductory College Level Experience in Microbiology – is a summer education program for Bay Area high school students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds unlike any other. Not only does iCLEM provide the students with a hands-on science experience, it also pays them a salary. iCLEM is sponsored by the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center.

Under the mentorship of Berkeley Lab nuclear scientist Azriel Goldschmidt, Abdel Bachri and his physics students at Southern Arkansas University are helping in the hunt for the neutrino-less double decay, one of the rarest decays in nature. Many top scientific teams around the world are on the hunt to confirm this phenomenon, which would demonstrate that physicists’ standard model of particles is incomplete and will very likely bring a Nobel Prize to the winning team. They are participants in the Faculty and Student Teams (FaST) program, one of more than a dozen educational and internship programs offered by Berkeley Lab’s Center for Science and Engineering Education.

iCLEM, which stands for Introductory College Level Experience in Microbiology, is a program that provides paid internships to underserved Bay Area high school students, giving them a chance to participate in actual scientific research while gaining experience in numerous college preparation activities and earning money.

Emily Chen still vividly remembers the lecture on gecko feet. She was an eighth grader attending Berkeley Lab’s Nano*High program to hear materials scientist Arun Majumdar explain how what he was learning about gecko feet might translate into a new adhesive product based on carbon nanotubes. Many students come away from a Berkeley Lab summer internship—or just a weekend lecture—infected by the scientists’ passion for their work and with a sharper focus on their own academic and career path.

Launched as a pilot project at Berkeley Lab, the Cleantech to Market program is finishing its first semester as an official class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and it’s safe to say the students learned more than they expected on how to take a technology from the laboratory to the marketplace. What was less expected is how much the scientists got out of the program.

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens, K.C. Cole’s newly published biography of the “uncle of the atom bomb,” as Frank Oppenheimer called himself, recounts the touching and sometimes tortuous relationship between Frank, Ernest Lawrence, and other physicists as they struggled to find a way to survive a nuclear age. Oppenheimer’s solution was to found an extraordinary science museum, the Exploratorium.

Berkeley Lab is partnering with Oakland Technical High School and El Cerrito High School in their Green Academies. Beginning this fall, students and their teachers will be able to take lab tours, hear talks by Berkeley Lab scientists and eventually, some will have eight-week summer internships.

Contact: Rollie Otto, Head, CSEE
RJOtto@lbl.gov, 510-486-5325

BERKELEY, CA –The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will be enhancing its science education outreach in the Bay Area, thanks to a $100,000 gift from Stephen D. Bechtel, Jr, former chairman of the Board of Directors of The Bechtel Group engineering and project management [...]