This award is to support the renewal of the REU site run by JILA (formerly Joint Institute of Laboratory Astrophysics) and the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado. The primary objective is to provide opportunities for undergraduate students to participate in high quality ongoing research programs. This year selected students will spend 10 weeks during the summer at the University of Colorado in Boulder. The intellectual focus of the REU program is physics and undergraduate students are paired up with preeminent faculty to do research in the fields of Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, Biophysics, Condensed Matter Physics, Elementary Particle and Nuclear Physics, Plasma Physics, Physics Education Research, and Geophysics. Although the main emphasis of the summer is centered around each student's individual research lab, where the students are expected to master at least a part of a large task, a variety of other activities take place during the program. These include ethics, electronics, and machining classes, a "Getting Into Grad School" discussion, as well as lab tours and a weekly science seminar series aimed at the students. The program culminates with a day of presentations given by each of the REU students.
" and is centered at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Our program website is: www.colorado.edu/physics/Web/reu This grant ran for one year and supported eight undergraduate students for a ten-week period during the summer. Two of our students were matched 50/50 from other sources and an additional six students were supported by the Liquid Crystal MRSEC but joined all of the activities that we organized. Therefore, we effectively had a nice sized group of fourteen students total for all of our group activities. The intellectual focus of this REU program is physics. Undergraduate students were paired up with preeminent faculty to do cutting-edge research in essentially all fields of physics. Fields that the students worked in included Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics, Condensed Matter Physics, Plasma Physics, Particle Physics, and Physics Education Research. Every week of the program, one of the participating professors gave a lecture and a lab tour about their specific research project. We also had machine shop classes, electronics classes, ethics lectures, a program on 'getting into grad school', and a number of social activities. In the last week of the program each student gave a 15 minute presentation about their research. Each student also turned in a final paper describing their research project. The broader impacts of this program are many. It fits in with the NSF goal of developing a diverse and internationally competitive scientific and engineering workforce (of the 8 students 4 were male and 4 female, 3 were Hispanic and one Native American, and 3 were from small colleges.) In general, active research experience is one of the most effective ways to attract talented undergraduates and retain them in careers in science and engineering. We did a variety of evaluations of the effectiveness of the program and the satisfaction of the students with the program. We found that the program was in general very well received and worthwhile. We will use this feedback to continue to improve our program. We find that our students are better equipped to contribute to the rest of society. Not all of the students that we educate stay within physics or even within science. However, the understanding that they gain about the scientific process, how research is performed, about ethics, and about communications skills will be beneficial to them and to their future colleagues, no matter what they end up doing.
