June 14, 2011
The Catholic University of America has won a grant of $82,163 from the National Science Foundation so undergraduate students can conduct solar physics research at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The grant "engages student learning at levels beyond the basic classroom and lab," says School of Arts and Sciences Dean L. R. Poos. Involving undergraduates in scientific research is a direction of great interest in higher education and a "principal aim" of Catholic University, he explains.
The May award comes through the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. It is the first installment of a five-year grant supporting the Scientific and Engineering Student Internship program (SESI), a joint Catholic University-NASA project that enables undergraduates across the country to work alongside some of the world's leading scientists and engineers at Goddard during the summer.
Catholic University has run the SESI program for the last 25 years, and a number of the University's physics and engineering students have cut their teeth in the research internships, says Associate Professor Frederick Bruhweiler, who heads the program and the University's Institute for Astrophysics and Computational Sciences.
The SESI program attracts "some of the best" undergraduate and graduate students to Catholic University, notes Bruhweiler.
"What better experience can students get than helping develop new instruments for NASA missions or helping analyze exciting new data from spacecraft orbiting the sun, Earth, or other planets in the solar system?" he says.
The SESI program covers areas that range from atmospheric chemistry to ocean sciences. The recent grant will focus on student research in heliophysics.
The University runs a NASA-funded heliospheric research center at Goddard, where Catholic University scientists are developing technologies and conducting scientific studies to better understand the physics of the sun and forecast energetic eruptions on the sun's surface and predict their resulting disruptions of the world's electrical power grids.
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