Dr. Milan Mijic, at the California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA), and his collaborators, will undertake a three-year "Internships for Public Science Education" (IPSE) program with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), to train total of nine undergraduate and six graduate students. The goal is to develop and present accurate and effective scientific visualizations of topics in Cosmology. The interns will be guided by CSULA faculty from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and by research scientists from the JPL Cosmology Group. For the computer animations, CSULA faculty from the Computer Science Department and the Department of Art will provide guidance.
Student training will be organized around specific cosmology projects, some of which are related to current and upcoming NASA and ESA missions. The projects will progress through scientific programming and building of customized graphics tools, and culminate with scientifically accurate, aesthetically pleasing, and educationally effective computer animations that will be used for public education programs at the campus planetarium, which itself will be a part of the CSULA Science Complex now under construction.
