The past 6 months have been an incredibly productive and exciting time for us in terms of sustainability outreach and education! At PCC, we wrapped up our Fall course entitled, Human Impact on the Environment with our ‘Be a Change Agent’ projects—where students designed all kinds of cool projects to make a positive impact in their communities!
These community outreach projects explored the UN sustainable development goals (UN SDGs), and promoted environmental stewardship. Students wrote letters to Congress using the Climate Citizens Lobby, created YouTube videos to educate the public about climate change using data rom the NASA Climate Change website, designed and led public discussions about ocean acidification, and taught lessons about the PB framework. Some of us designed outreach lessons to teach young students about sustainability, and we all participated in ocean and land cleanups of plastics to prevent contamination.
In the Spring of 2019 at PCC, in our Chemistry and the Environment course, students connected the UN SDGs to their careers and taught others about how to implement these important goals as they pursue that career path. In class, they made [algae] biofuels,sustainable paints, natural polymers, and participated in other labs regarding sustainable chemistry and green chemistry.
Our research group got our first ever AFM image of DNA origami nano-triangles at PCC!
[AFM image taken May 4th, 2019]
The isolation chamber we built for the AFM helped diminish the noise quite a bit!
We did our annual ‘Science for March’ outreach event at Caltech in March 2019:
[teaching students about microparticle bombardment using a game simulation, 03.16.19]
And our annual Girls Science Day at PCC in April 2019:
[teaching students about the chemistry of ice cream, 04.27.19]
In November 2018, we presented at the annual SETAC conference in Sacramento in a session called, ‘Incorporation of Sustainability into Undergraduate Curricula in Science and Engineering’ and our presentation was called: Planetary boundaries in STEM education towards a sustainable future: integrating sustainability into the undergraduate curriculum. We learned a lot and started some amazing collaborations. It was really great to be around like-minded scientists and citizens who care about our environment!
Also in November 2018, our students presented their work on nanotechnology at the Southern California Conference for Undergraduate Research (hosted at PCC, through CUR).
2 different student research posters won prizes this year, one for our work on making bioplastics from banana peels and another for a student-designed project about investigating the riparian health of the L.A. river. Congratulations to students for doing great work on these fantastic and creative projects!
For Earth Day [04.22.19], we saw a great lecture from Terry Tamminen, CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, at Caltech’s Resnick Sustainability Institute. It was very informative and inspiring to the group!
[credit NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html]
We will keep you updated on our work; we have some publications in the works and we are designing new activities for sustainability outreach. So far, 2019 has been amazing and we have learned a lot, met a lot of new people through our outreach, and inspired a lot of young students towards a sustainable future!
[undergraduate research in sustainability, PCC]
As famous naturalist John Muir once said, “When one tugs at a single thing in Nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world’.
Remember to always reflect on our lovely Planet Earth, its beauty and what it provides for us, and take care of this living, breathing, thriving planet to keep it healthy for many generations to come!
[credit NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html]