The CIERA High School Summer Research Experience in Astronomy at Northwestern provided an interactive, hands-on astronomy research experience for high school students remotely this summer, hosting 12 students from June 29 – August 7.
The small-cohort program provided an atmosphere of team-based learning alongside mentorship from Northwestern faculty, researchers, and student astronomers. Participants took computer programming classes, listened to astronomy lectures on cutting-edge research, and tackled advanced readings.
Instead of assigning students to individual research projects, the remote-adapted program allowed all students to work collaboratively on multiple, week-long research learning endeavors. One of these projects involved the students learning how to read and utilize data from the Gaia space telescope to map the evolutionary stages of the life of a star.
“We had really great staff, grad students, postdocs, and students that were a part of this,” said program director Patrick Sheehan. “They were able to adapt on the fly and put together some really great projects that the students were able to enjoy doing and get a good exposure to research.”
Congratulations to all of the students that participated in the summer program and thank you to all who worked to make this experience possible!
Learn more about the CIERA High School Summer Research Experience in Astronomy program.
Top to bottom, left to right:
Students: Madeline Oh, Manal, Violet Berlin, August Masley, Mark Wehner, Estrella Popoca, Julien Kearns, Nicholas Hurst, Francisco Pantoja, JT Turner, Brandon Lu
Northwestern: Anastasia Montgomery, Patrick Sheehan, Alexandria Romasanta, Giacomo Fragione, Michael Stroh, Monica Gallegos-Garcia, Michael Katz, Kyle Rocha, Nick Kaaz
