This collaboration, spearheaded by professors Andrew Wilson and Morgan Balabanoff in the , connects UofL undergraduate and graduate students with Jefferson County Public School high schoolers to create a “near-peer” community designed to spark curiosity in STEM fields.

“Having a college student there at the high school gives them an opportunity to network and discuss what college is like, what is a degree like, and have those soft interactions that make a difference,” Wilson said.Ěý

Heading into its fourth year and continually expanding, the program offers a diverse range of activities designed to expose students to chemistry – whether that’s through laboratory experiments mirroring research at UofL, interactive poster sessions, assistance at science fairs or even a pen pal program.

Cailet Hardtmann-Huckabee, a 10th-grade chemistry teacher at Fairdale High School, agrees that the interactions with college students are eye-opening for the students.

“Allowing students to speak with a variety of people in different stages of progress toward their scientific goals and collegiate journey opens my students’ eyes to the expanse of topics that could be studied and often changes their perception of what it looks like to do science after high school,” she said.

Bridging the science gapĚý

“Nano Day” serves as a cornerstone of the initiative, providing high school students with hands-on experience in nanoparticle synthesis and characterization. This process generates incredibly tiny particles, often by precisely controlling chemical reactions, enabling the harnessing of their unique properties for diverse applications. Hardtmann-Huckabee said the experiment directly follows their unit on separation methods, during which students learn diverse techniques to separate mixtures based on component properties.

“Since we have increased our collaboration to include a wide variety of experiences throughout the school year, we are able to use the experiences to complement the content we already have planned,” Hardtmann-Huckabee said.

This is often students’ first exposure to professional lab equipment beyond that in a high school setting. Cas Koevoets-Beach, a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry, has volunteered for two years. Koevoets-Beach said synthesizing nanoparticles gives students “hands-on experience with new techniques and instrumentation that they might not see in their curriculum.”

“It also forces them to make connections between the foundational concepts they’re learning about in their classes like light-matter interactions and properties of light and how they fit into more sophisticated research,” Koevoets-Beach said.

There’s also value to the UofL students that participate, especially those interested in pursuing academia.

“Most of us are used to talking to undergraduate STEM majors or faculty about chemistry, so it’s been a cool challenge to adapt our explanations of chemical concepts and technical directions for younger scientists to help them develop their understanding,” said Koevoets-Beach. “Watching how the high school teachers and our professors have collaborated has been an invaluable lesson in how to better bridge the gap between high school and college science courses.”

New funding provides expanded opportunities

The recently awarded funding to the UofL initiative for the development and distribution of science education materials focused on nanoparticle synthesis to chemistry students across Kentucky.

This grant will enable the creation of educational and experimental kits, expanding nanotechnology opportunities to schools outside of JCPS and further inspire students to pursue STEM fields. Wilson, Balabanoff and graduate students will be putting the kits together this summer.

“The kits will be accompanied by some instructional materials so that the high school teachers can run the labs in their respective schools, and we’ll also do either a virtual training with the high school teachers, or if they’re nearby, then we’ll do an in-person one with them,” said Balabanoff.

Through continued collaboration and the widespread distribution of these innovative kits, UofL’s chemistry department will continue to spark scientific curiosity all across the Commonwealth.

High school teachers interested in receiving a kit shipped to their school should contactĚýMorgan Balabanoff via email.

Committed to advancing the science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) community, the SOA is focused on a strategy to build a STEMM workforce that reflects the culturally rich, innovative and diverse talent pool of the United States.

SOA has engaged hundreds of partners to implement STEMM Equity and Excellence 2050: A National Strategy for Progress and Prosperity, with the goal of helping 20 million people from historically excluded and marginalized communities enter, contribute to and thrive within STEMM fields.

For UofL, this is a transformative effort that includes the College of Arts & Sciences, College of łÉČËÖ±˛Ą & Human Development, J.B. Speed School of Engineering, and School of Medicine in networking with national foundations, companies and the federal government to offer scholarships and expand the opportunity for STEMM careers to more students.

“For too long, many students have had to swim upstream to pursue careers in STEMM and UofL is joining the vital effort to seek fundamental, systemic change. Complex problems require multifaceted, creative, and innovative solutions, which are best addressed with diverse teams bringing distinct perspectives to achieve scientific excellence,” said James Orlick, director of grant writing and innovation for UofL’s Office of Institutional Equity. “Equity and excellence are connected.”

Eating disorders affect an estimated 9% of Americans — nearly 30 million people — and can impact a person’s eating behaviors and perceptions about food and their bodies. The UofL prototype technology, dubbed Awaken Emerse, helps users virtually face and overcome their associated fears, such as the fear of gaining weight.

“Research shows exposure treatment can be really effective in taking back control over these devastating and life-altering fears,” said Christina Ralph-Nearman, a assistant research professor, researcher and co-inventor of the technology. “Our virtual simulation allows people to do that in a safe way.”Ěý

In a pilot study, Awaken Emerse — invented by Ralph-Nearman and researcher Cheri Levinson — was shown to be effective in helping participants face their fears of gaining weight. The new grant, $125,000 through the NEDA’s Feeding Hope Fund, will support work by the inventors, along with Andrew Karem of the J.B. Speed School of Engineering, to expand the platform to be more inclusive of all body types and sizes, ethnicities, races and gender identities and to further test outcomes in a clinical setting.ĚýĚý

“Eating disorders don’t just affect one type of person — there are a multitude of factors that can influence them,” said Levinson, associate professor and director of the Eating Anxiety Treatment (EAT) Lab. “Treatment and prevention options should reflect that full range of experience.”

The NEDA grant comes on the heels of some $11.5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support Levinson’s work to better understand and address some of the most devastating effects of eating disorders. That research will investigate how eating disorders may develop in childhood and adolescence, their contribution to suicidal behaviors and how innovative personalized treatments, like VR simulation, may offer hope.

“Despite the high prevalence of eating disorders, there still aren’t many options for treatment and prevention,” she said. “This work will not only create new options by leveraging technology, but open previously unopened doors for treating people on a personal, individual level.”

Work to develop the VR technology has also been supported by the UofL Office of Research and Innovation’s intellectual property and new ventures teams. This includes patenting, coaching by entrepreneur-in-residence Alice Shade, and training and financial support through two innovation development programs: KYNETIC, focused on furthering biomedical technologies, and PRePARE, focused on technologies that address a health or societal problem resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The UofL is part of the ground-based team for NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) program, which launched in spring 2018 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.Ěý

The mission is to identify Earth-like planets revolving around nearby stars, with the UofL team helping verify results and figuring out the characteristics of the discovered planets.

The program has identified 20-some planets in its first year. AccordingĚý, citing a study in that includes a “rocky super-Earth” and two “sub-Neptunes.”

These three help fill inĚýour understanding of how planets form, the article said, because they’re somewhere in between planets like Earth — rocky and small — andĚýNeptune — gaseous and big.

“There’s kind of a gap in examples between these two,” saidĚýDr. John Kielkopf, a professor of physics and astronomy at UofL and member of the TESS team.

The TESS satellite will search about 85 percent of the sky for planets over two years. The images will be somewhat low-resolution and cover huge sections of sky, so there will be some blending of stars with one another.Ěý

The data and management for the TESS program are led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The ground-based partners, including UofL and its Moore Observatory, in Crestwood, Kentucky, will help check the information collected by the satellite, and expand on it.

“The data come back to us, and we analyze it to measure the transit events precisely, or in some cases to show that the event does not happen, or is mimicked by some other event,” Kielkopf said.Ěý“Our measurements improve on the precision of the satellite, and are used to find the radius of the planets and the exact times at which they pass in front of the star.Ěý

Dr. Karen Collins, who is leading the TESS follow-up program through Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, helped develop the software behind this research as part of her doctoral studies in the department of Physics and Astronomy at UofL. The software she developed is now widely used for studying planet candidates identified by the Kepler satellite and for TESS followup.

In addition to UofL’s Moore Observatory, university researchers and students will work with UofL’s telescopes at the Mt. Lemmon (Arizona) and Mt. Kent (Australia) observatories. The telescopes will use photometry and spectroscopy to measure the brightness of the star and speed of the planet’s orbit, in collaboration with the University of Southern Queensland.

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