Reaching out to Aspiring Scientists

When Cari D. Pentecost reflects on the most memorable of her high school science experiments--designing a container that would keep an egg from breaking during a fall--she can't help but laugh at its tenuous connection to experimental science. "It was fun, and I learned some physics," the third-year chemistry graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, recalls, "but I knew that scientists weren't trying to figure out a way to drop an egg off a building."

So this spring, when Pentecost and a dozen or so other UCLA graduate students and postdocs built 14 scanning tunneling microscopes (STMs) and donated them to underperforming high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the experience was particularly poignant. "I was a LAUSD student," Pentecost says. "I know how badly their experiments need updating."

The STMs are the brainchild of Adam Braunschweig, a fourth-year graduate student in chemistry professor J. Fraser Stoddart's lab. A new STM with all the bells and whistles can cost upward of $250,000. The UCLA students were able to build their own rudimentary version for about $1,500 apiece. "The cost of this tool makes it accessible to even the poorest high schools," Braunschweig says. "The high schools pay nothing, and there's a free computer that comes with the instrument."

Braunschweig tells C&EN that he was inspired by a basic STM design he found on the Internet. The scanning mechanism was based on the piezoelectric speakers found in musical greeting cards. The homemade instrument can't achieve single-atom resolution like its pricier cousins, but it images surface structures that are just a few nanometers across.

"I realized how simple the technology was, so I thought, 'Let's try to build one,' " Braunschweig says. He thought it would make an excellent addition to the California NanoSystems Institute's community outreach program, which aims to bring nanoscience and nanotechnology into the classrooms of L.A.'s poorest performing public schools.

CNSI ESTABLISHED the program in 2002 in conjunction with UCLA's Materials Creation Training Program, the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships, and the Dreyfus Foundation. Sarah H. Tolbert, a UCLA chemistry professor who spearheaded the effort, explains that, when CNSI set up shop in 2000, its founders wanted community outreach to be a fundamental part of the institute's mission.

They figured that LAUSD's promising students might be encouraged to pursue science careers if they got a peek at experiments in the cutting-edge field of nanoscience. "The students realize this technology that they are in love with is not made by voodoo; it's made by chemistry that they can do," Tolbert says.

Tolbert admits that, at first, the idea of navigating the bureaucracy of the Los Angeles public school system seemed about as easy as navigating the headwaters of the Amazon. She enlisted the help of her colleagues in UCLA's Graduate School of Education & Information Studies. They had the resources and infrastructure to organize the program's workshops and could offer continuing education credits for the high school teachers who volunteer to participate. CNSI, Tolbert says, provided cutting-edge experiments.

"It's more than just paying lip service to outreach," Stoddart, CNSI's director, points out. "Now, there's a sizable part of the grant that's devoted to outreach."

It's graduate students and postdocs who take on most of the responsibility for the outreach program, Tolbert notes. Together, they generate experiments that they think will translate well to a high school classroom. Tolbert helps them figure out how to make those experiments mesh with the stringent standards that California's science curriculum is based on. The students run a series of workshops designed to show the high school teachers how to use the experiments in their classroom, and the outreach program provides the high schools with the materials they need for the experiments.

Nearly 50 teachers from 14 Los Angeles area schools have participated in the program since it began two years ago. They've done experiments with photolithography and made solar cells using raspberry juice. But it was the homemade STMs that really set this outreach program apart. "There's something to be said for exposing students to real equipment," Tolbert says. "But it takes a lot of time for the students involved, and the physics of [the STM] is very complicated."

Given the extraordinary amount of work involved in making 14 STMs before high school let out for the summer, the graduate students had to work in overdrive, recruiting as many colleagues as they could. Avik Chakravarty, a postdoctoral fellow working with UCLA physics professor Seth J. Putterman, recalls his first visit to an outreach planning meeting. "I was immediately leapt on to help with this STM-building project," he says, "probably because I was the only physicist on the project."

Ultimately, a gang of chemists, physicists, and engineers all pitched in to build the STMs. Braunschweig figures that at one point he was spending 12 hours each day on the project. Chakravarty says that building the STMs "took slightly more than a month of my life." He adds that his postdoctoral mentor didn't seem at all bothered by the extracurricular work, not even when makeshift microscopes gobbled up a big portion of his lab space.

In fact, all of the graduate students C&EN spoke with say that their research mentors couldn't have been more supportive of their outreach efforts. They reluctantly acknowledge, however, that not every faculty member shared that attitude. A few students asked if they could participate without telling their advisers. But those that were allowed to participate freely say they are grateful for the experience.

"I know this won't go into my thesis," Pentecost says, "but you can never overprepare your communication skills. For me, learning to communicate science to different types of people has been a huge benefit."

Of course, the high school students seem to be getting something out of the outreach program as well. Tom Canny, a science teacher at Verdugo Hills High School, Tujunga, Calif., who participated in the outreach program, tells C&EN that experiments are helping him get certain concepts across in a more tangible way. "It is not 'gee whiz' sort of stuff," he says.

And in some cases, CNSI's outreach efforts really have gotten students excited about working in science. Canny says that when UCLA graduate student Kirsten Griffiths spoke to his class, a number of his students just lit up. He recalls that they said, " 'You mean we can do this?' "

Canny says the program has also made students aware of opportunities to work in science that they weren't aware of. "Frankly, I wasn't aware of them either," Canny admits. Now, three of his students who had been looking for summer jobs flipping burgers are going after science internships. "Our students are realizing that there's a whole world of science out there, and they can be part of it."