Our outreach revolves around enhancing science literacy, attracting and retaining underrepresented students, and making science and physics more tangible. Informed by our image-forming characterization and modeling techniques and sciences, we pursue the visualization of science and physical mechanisms and interactions which simultaneously integrates arts with sciences in middle school, high school, college, and grad school.
Science Turns into ART at the Sheldon Museum of ART (START SMART) is an outreach program envisioned and developed by our group and organized and led by our undergraduate students. It aims to foster curiosity and engagement of high school juniors and seniors, and their parents and teachers via inspiring the creation of art from physical principles with the ultimate goal of encouraging education and careers in STEM fields. The experiential learning will demystify physics and corresponding mathematical equations in order to help increase the enrollment in physical sciences courses, which nation-wide has been declining in recent years.
In February 2024, we offered workshops to learn about physical principles, complete hands-on art projects, and model what is seen through the use of mathematics. We also provided an inside perspective on why you should choose physics and its relevance today.
START SMART has been supported by the National Science Foundation under grant no. 2203933 and the UNL CAS research impact and engagement grant: START SMART.
FunSize Physics is an open online platform to share the joy of scientific discovery. It is operated by Shireen Adenwalla (UNL Physics) and Jocelyn Bosley (UNL Research Impact Coordinator) and funded by the National Science Foundation. It explores the strange and wonderful world of condensed matter physics through short articles on cutting-edge discoveries and experiments you can try yourself.