The Research Experience in Solid Earth Science for Students (RESESS) program has established itself as a successful program for multi-year summer research internships for Earth science undergraduates from populations underrepresented in science. Students are recruited in their sophomore or junior year and complete 10-week internships that include research, leadership training, an eight-week communication workshop, multi-faceted mentoring, and a final colloquium. Additional funding through this award is being used to take RESESS to the next level of success by expanding the number of interns, extending the scientific content and geographic reach of the program, and building a model for sustainability based on a program infrastructure with disseminated mentoring. The expanded program will support a minimum of 12 interns per year, with students spending their first two years in Boulder and then transitioning to work with research mentors throughout the United States during their 10-week summer experience. RESESS will continue a successful collaboration with the award-winning Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program. Expansion into a more distributed model of mentoring - necessary because there is no central research facility analogous to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the geology and geophysics community - is being achieved through expanded partnerships. These partners include scientists in the United States Geological Survey (USGS) in Golden, Colorado, at the University of Colorado, Boulder, staff at UNAVCO, and scientists of the UNAVCO and Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) research consortia, along with new partners in the Colorado Diversity Initiative and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Intern research projects are expected to include topics such as the technical aspects of GPS, analyzing the seismicity of Asian earthquakes, modeling volcanic magma movement, installing GPS networks to monitor regional tectonics, paleoclimate analyses of insect damage to fossil leaves, lineaments in Antarctica, and others. To sustain the program beyond NSF funding, RESESS is exploring the utility of the Business Performance Excellence model, while engaging the community for increased scientific and financial resources and exploring diversified funding sources.
