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I received the NSF career award that starts in May. It’s one of the most prestigious
awards for a young faculty member, and certainly one I had in terms of my goals as a young
faculty member. I was delighted to hear that I received the reward, and excited to be able
to use that funding over the next five years to support my group. To advance the science
within my group, in terms of supporting students and really allow them to work on advanced
chemistry, polymer chemistry, as well as using advanced characterization tools to learn new
chemistry in the lab. What this Grant will allow is basically $500,000
over five years. What that allows me to do is to support two full-time graduate students
in the lab along with their associated chemistry supplies and consumables and support those
students over five years. So it gives some degree of stability in terms of support for
those students over the next five years. The other aspect is outreach and development.
What it allows us to do is to continue our outreach to K-12 schools, and develop a summer
teacher development workshop where they’ll come in and spend two to three days with us
in the summer. They’ll receive training in inquiry-based science, and they’ll leave
the workshop with hands on science kids that are focused on polymer chemistry that they
can take back to the classroom and implement in their own classroom with the help of myself
and my graduate students to really drive home the inquiry-based learning style. The goal
there is to get students interested in science at an early age. So, targeting 3-5 grades
and get those kids interested in science and hopefully they carry that through the rest
of their education career.