This project seeks to continue to provide undergraduate students an opportunity to conduct intensive, collaborative satellite and ground-based remote sensing research with faculty mentors from within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Remote Sensing Science and Technology Center (NOAA-CREST) consortium. Ten STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students will be recruited from City University of New York (CUNY)'s 23 separate campuses. For fifteen weeks, these students will become part of a community of research scholars who are actively engaged in state-of-the-art remote sensing applications. They will participate in research group meetings, seminars, oral and poster presentations at local, regional, and national conferences, and two of them will sail across the Atlantic Ocean to West Africa, conducting in situ remote sensing research. Through these unique and innovative endeavors, many underrepresented minority students who would otherwise not pursue STEM education altogether or would not pursue STEM education through to the graduate level can choose to follow STEM pathways to either graduate education or careers in STEM.
Intellectual merit The project will provide promising undergraduate students the opportunity to work with scientists and engineers and conduct research at one of our nation's premier scientific center in the area of Satellite and Ground-Based Remote Sensing. Remote Sensing is a critically important, unique, and young area of science, and it is practically unknown to many, if not most, of the undergraduates at CUNY. The project activities combine year long research experiences with focused, multidimensional/layered mentoring, and a robust learning community that produce holistic and engaging stimuli for the scientific and academic growth and development of the participated students. The scientific and educational value of this project derives from two main sources: 1) a focus on the transfer of learning from sciences and mathematics to technology, computer systems and engineering applications where fundamental principles learned in particular natural sciences and mathematics courses are applied to real-world problems; and 2) the scientific, mathematical, and engineering expertise of the NOAA-CREST researchers, all of whom are professionally active scholars.
Broader impacts The students participating in this program will become the future engineers and scientists of our nation. Even those students who choose other careers will greatly benefit both themselves and our society by having a deeper understanding of the importance of the science. The ethics component will have lifelong relevance to participants no matter what their future endeavors: they will have engaged with the most pressing ethical challenges presented by science and technology today and in the future. Moreover, the project will allow the undergraduate researchers to hone their acquired skills and knowledge by being research mentors to K - 12 students in the New York City Public school system. Participants will have engaged with scientists from different disciplines and different institutions who share common intellectual values of inquiry and integrity.
