REU Site: Physics and Chemistry Research at The College of Wooster

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY

Supported by the Division of Materials Research, this REU site in the Physics and Chemistry departments at The College of Wooster involves students as collaborators on innovative research projects in materials science, physics, and chemistry. Each summer, 8 students will participate in a 9-week program focused on research and including additional professional development and outreach activities.

As faculty at an institution specializing in undergraduate research, the REU mentors are experienced in transforming students from tentative beginners into confident scientists. The program particularly targets beginning students and community college students and prepares and motivates them for future careers in science through a direct, mentored research experience.

A welcoming and collaborative environment provides a place for students who have been marginalized in the STEM community to thrive. The program's range of research areas provides an intellectual home for students who use experimental and computational methods to explore interdisciplinary topics across materials science, physics, and chemistry. Projects address systems and phenomena across vastly different scales, ranging from molecules to galaxies.

Through engaging students in these projects and professional development, the program results in broadening educational access, developing professional interest in STEM, and increasing the competitiveness of the American workforce. TECHNICAL SUMMARY

The broad goal of the College of Wooster REU program is to create an atmosphere conducive to high-quality science in a vibrant research community where students increase their confidence and sense of belonging. Through a balance of experiment, computation, and theory, the REU site advances knowledge in the fields of condensed matter, granular matter, soft matter physics, optics, chemical physics, pattern formation, sol-gels, and astrophysics.

Research students in granular matter develop video analysis techniques to characterize the avalanche dynamics on a critical pile of beads to investigate universal scaling laws. Other students measure the thermodynamic properties of swellable organically modified silica, a "swellable glass" that absorbs many times its own mass in organic liquids like acetone and has applications in industrial and environmental remediation.

Using recent images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astrophysics researchers investigate the evolution of clumpy galaxies. All research projects are designed so that even novice undergraduates can make significant scientific contributions. They become practicing scientists through research, oral and poster presentations, and comprehensive written reports.

After the end of the program, faculty continue mentoring student participants to prepare conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications together. As part of continual improvement of mentoring and student training, the program leaders also will develop a framework to explicitly expand students' scientific argumentation skills. These tools for developing and assessing student critical thinking skills in scientific argumentation will be useful to other programs seeking to bring effective, high-quality research mentoring to a broader, more diverse student population.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.