Summer Student Research at the NSLS

Each summer, many high school and college students perform summer research projects at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Many of the students work at the NSLS, teaming up with an NSLS scientist, as part of Laboratory-sponsored research internship programs.

The students work with scientists and engineers in a wide range of research fields, including medical sciences, geology and environmental sciences, chemistry, materials science, physics, and electrical and mechanical engineering. In addition to their research projects, students have the opportunity to attend scientific lectures, tour Brookhaven research facilities, and participate in numerous social activities.

The following are summaries of programs that NSLS summer students participated in, and short profiles of some of the students that performed research here this summer.

Community Summer Science Program (CSSP)
This program invites high school students who have completed their junior or senior year to come to BNL for a six-week period, where they attend morning lectures and demonstrations by BNL scientists, workshops, and afternoon internships. Volunteer BNL mentors guide the interns in individual research projects.

Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI)
The SULI program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and offers internships for college students in the spring, summer, and fall terms. Participants are paired with a member of the BNL staff to perform a research project in chemistry, physics, engineering, biology, nuclear medicine, applied mathematics, particle accelerators, or science writing.

Also involved in research at the NSLS this summer were SULI participants Patrick Lynch (Bucknell University) and Matthew Teng (Cornell University), who worked with NSLS mentors John Skaritka and Zhong Zhong, respectively. Lynch worked on a “Mechanical Design Study of a Five-Meter Superconducting Undulator” and Teng’s project was titled “Use of Diffraction Enhanced Imaging to Determine Refractive Indices of Various Tissues at Select Energies.”

Pre-Service Teacher program (PST)
In this program, a collaboration with the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the DOE Office of Science, teachers in training are paired with scientist mentors and a professional teacher, and immersed in a research environment. The pre-teachers perform scientific research, which helps them learn how to better explain scientific concepts in a classroom environment.

Faculty and Student Teams (FaST)
The FaST program pairs a student/professor team from a university or college with limited research capabilities with a BNL scientist. For 10 weeks, the faculty/student team performs research they cannot do at their home institution, which not only helps the BNL researcher, but also gives the team experience while building a relationship between the institution and BNL.

At the NSLS, FaST program summer visitors from Southern University in Louisiana were faculty member Elhag Shaban and students Clifford Williams and Shayla Wilkinson. They worked with NSLS scientist Peter Siddons on new electron multiplier structures for synchrotron x-ray detector systems.

Article by: Laura Mgrdichian