Outreach

In a nutshell: I am currently in my 12th consecutive year of running a research-based outreach program at Lawrence High School (LHS) in cooperation with one of the classroom Physics and Astronomy teachers there.  This class occurs in a normal class-period in the high school and meets every day.  My NSF broader impact funds support two KU graduate students who help to run the class.  I attend the class once per week. 

The project: In this course the students spend the first semester learning astronomy and the second semester carrying out an authentic research project using data from the NASA Spitzer, WISE, and GALEX satellites as well as data from NOIRLab facilities.  In the current project the students are studying the morphology, gas content, and star formation rate of galaxies in the distributed filamentary large scale structure around the Virgo Cluster. The culmination of the project is a research mini-symposium at KU in which the students present their work in poster format to KU faculty and students. 

The students: A goal of this program is to bring research astronomy to students who would not usually have had the chance, with a focus on women and students from traditionally marginalized groups.   Until last year, the program had anywhere from 8-15 students.  By changing the format of the class, in the 23-24AY year we had 16 students and in the 24-25AY we have 27!  

The staff: The program was started in cooperation with Andrew Bricker, a KU Astronomy BA recipient and LHS Physics and Astronomy teacher.  Andy worked with the program till 2020 at which point he carried the lessons of the program to his other classes.  Seven KU graduate students and one postbac student have participated in this program since its inception.  These students are the core of the project as they bring time, research expertise, and astronomy knowledge to supplement that of the high school teachers.  The graduate students who have finished their PhD have been very successful.  Mindy Townsend is the head astronomer of the Dudley Observatory at Siena College and Alex Polanski is the Percival Lowell Postdoctoral Fellow at Lowell Observatory.

Knowledge transference: Both high school teachers have taken lessons learned about astronomy and research methodology and brought them into their other classes. Simultaneously, their knowledge about how to work at the high school level has been an invaluable resource to the KU students and I as we develop and grow the program.