Law Accepts Tenure Track Faculty Position

CarbonEARTH alum Jeffrey Law has accepted a new position as tenure track faculty at Daemen College, a private, nonsectarian, co-educational, comprehensive college in in Amherst, NY. At Daemen, Law will teach introductory biology, botany, and ecology.

April 4, 2013

Giordano featured in San Francisco Chronicle

Andrea Giordano, Cindy Warming and their class at Philipsburg Elementary were recently featured on the San Francisco Chronicle website. The class took a field trip to Penn State's Food Science Department. While there they learned about the entire food process and how they might integrate this kind of science into their curriculum.

March 28, 2013

Thanks to all who helped make the 2013 CarbonEARTH Carbon Conference a success!

Suarez Receives Postdoctoral Fellowship

CarbonEARTH alum Alejandro Suarez was recently awarded a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval Research Laboratory beginning in December, 2012. The National Research Council (NRC) Research Associateship Programs fund competitive postdoctoral fellowships for young researchers to carry out independent research in various government laboratories. Applicants must develop their own research proposals which are peer-reviewed by scientists through the NRC to be considered for an award.

October 24, 2012

Grettenberger Accepts Fellowship and Award

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) recently awarded CarbonEARTH alum Ian Grettenberger a Pre-Doctoral Fellowship. This two year fellowship will fund Grettenberger on a project entitled "Exploiting increased intraspecific diversity to improve crop response to the abiotic and biotic stressors of climate change." Grettenberger also received the Kenneth and Barbara Starks Plant Resistance to Insects Graduate Student Research Award from the Entomological Society of America.

September 10, 2012

Suarez and Dulny Run SEECoS Program

This summer, CarbonEARTH alum Alejandro Suarez and fellow J.D. Dulny participated in Penn State’s SEECoS (Summer Experience in the Eberly College of Science) program. Each year, this program brings talented high school students from resource-limited school districts to Penn State’s University Park campus to work with STEM graduate students on academic research projects. JD and Alejandro’s group of three students constructed an electro-mechanical oscillator used to examine standing waves in metal plates. The high school students designed and built the standing wave generator themselves and studied the basic mathematics used to describe standing waves. At the end of the program, students then presented their results to a broad audience.

August 23, 2012

Turner Awarded Sloan Foundation Grant

CarbonEARTH Project Coordinator Chanda Turner recently received a $30,000 research grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Sloan Foundation manages a graduate scholarship program focused on increasing the number of underrepresented American minorities in mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering graduate programs. The Minority Ph.D. Program, established by the foundation in 1995, offers eligible doctoral candidates the opportunity to pursue their Ph.D. degrees with financial, mentoring, and guidance support through recognized participating faculty and departments approved by the foundation.

Powell Accepted to Medical School

CarbonEARTH fellow alum Luke Powell will be attending Drexel University College of Medicine in Fall 2012. The College has the largest medical student enrollment of any private medical school in the nation, with over 1,000 total medical students and 500 graduate students. Drexel employs more than 700 clinical and basic science faculty, and more than 1,700 affiliate and volunteer faculty.

Conklin Lands Teaching Position

Fellow alum Tracy Conklin has accepted a position teaching biology at Evansville Day School, a private K-12 school in Evansville, IN. The school enrolls students from diverse racial, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and provides a traditional curriculum emphasizing personal growth, academic excellence, and character education within small classroom settings.

Barnhart Accepts Faculty Position

CarbonEARTH fellow Shaunna Barnhart has accepted a Visiting Assistant Professor position of Environmental Science/Studies at Allegheny College. She joins a department known for its strong interdisciplinary approach to teaching environmental topics. She will be teaching a range of courses on environmental issues, including a course on environment and development in mountain regions.

2012 CarbonEARTH Expos

The 2012 CarbonEARTH Expos were an overwhelming success! The Harrisburg event, held June 2 at the downtown Whitaker Center, drew over 100 students, parents, and other guests to student/teacher collaborative STEM exhibits. At the May 10 Philipsburg Expo, dozens of students from the Philipsburg Elementary, Junior High, and North Lincoln Hill schools regaled a gym full of their peers, parents and other visitors with dozens of diverse demonstrations and experiments.

Harrisburg Expo
(Not pictured: Brian Kirkpatrick and Clay Magill)

Philipsburg Expo

Philipsburg Expo Press Coverage
The Expo made the news! Please see the press coverage of the event by the Centre Daily Times here and WJAC-TV news here.

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.

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.