This project seeks to continue to provide undergraduate students (community college and four-year students) an opportunity to conduct full-time, collaborative satellite and ground-based remote sensing research with faculty mentors from within NOAA-CREST’s Center for Earth System Sciences and Remote Sensing Technologies and its Center for Remote Sensing and Earth System Sciences. This previously funded REU site now has a newly tested community college component. Ten (10) STEM students (five from community colleges and five from four-year institutions) will be recruited from the City University of New York’s (CUNY) 23 campus-wide institutions. 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 research and applications. They will participate in research group meetings, seminars, oral and poster presentations at local, regional, and national conferences, and one team of them will participate in citizen science by engaging a local, environmentally active, but scientifically underserved community in basic, state-of-the-art, neighborhood-scale, multi-platformed, urban heat island studies in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community of Brooklyn, New York.
The activities combine year-long (Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring) research experiences with multidimensional/layered mentoring, academic support systems, and a robust learning community that produce holistic and engaging stimuli for the scientific and academic growth and development of the student participants. Moreover, the activities will allow the undergraduate researchers to hone their acquired skills and knowledge by being research mentors to high school students in the New York City public school system and to members of the local community. The REU site has six objectives: 1.) To engage a diverse cohort of undergraduates in collaborative, state-of-the-art satellite and ground-based remote sensing research through mentorship by experts in the field, 2.) To create and sustain a community and a pipeline of scholars among whom academic excellence in STEM is achieved and the pursuit of baccalaureate degrees, advanced degrees, and STEM careers is encouraged, 3.) To provide students with the tools, the confidence, and the maturity necessary to succeed in a research-rich environment and to develop their communication (oral and written) and presentation skills, 4.) To create opportunities for students to meaningfully engage in citizen science by partnering with and sharing their urban heat island research results with community residents for whom such results are critically vital, 5.) To train students in the ethical and responsible conduct of research as well as the ethical implications of scientific and technological applications in society and to provide opportunities for students to be peer ambassadors who promote undergraduate research, 6) To broaden the impacts of the REU opportunity by including students on other funding in the cohort and professional development activities.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
