by Natalie Kashanchi
As technology advances and the world grows more connected, it is important to provide future generations with an education that includes modern-day scientific advances as well as the opportunity to be immersed in real-world experiences of developing a viable product. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is trying to do just that through its education outreach program. CNSI Education, with the help of graduate student volunteers from an array of different departments on campus, works directly with teachers and students in the Los Angeles area to enhance the classroom curricula. Like myself, many graduate trainees from the Innovations at the Nexus of Food, Energy, and Water Systems (INFEWS) volunteer their time to help run the many programs offered to the Los Angeles community.
Working with CNSI Education staff, graduate students have developed lab procedures teaching nanoscience phenomena, such as biopolymers, ferrofluids, measurements at the nanoscale, and photolithography to name a few. These procedures have been adapted for elementary, middle, and high school student comprehension level, as needed. Throughout the academic year, workshops run by graduate student volunteers are held once a month on Saturdays, where K-12 teachers come to UCLA and experience being students for the day. Teachers are provided with all the necessary materials to work through the lab manuals and experiments first hand. This is paired with a presentation given by a student leader to help the teachers understand the underlying scientific processes that they are observing. The teachers also have the opportunity to interact with graduate students to ask any questions they may have about the science, in addition to getting to know each other. Once all experiments have been completed, a professor from UCLA, who performs research related to the field studied during the experiment, joins to give a talk on their work. Some of the past guest speakers include: Professor Justin Caram and Professor Bill Gelbart from the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Professor Omai Garner from UCLA Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and Associate Director of CNSI, Dr. Adam Stieg. These talks provide teachers with the opportunity to connect everything they learned from the workshop to a real-world application. After the workshop, teachers are provided with the lab manuals and kits that contain all of the material required to take what they learned back to their classroom to perform the experiments with their students.
Volunteering for the workshops has been a very rewarding experience for me, both from a scientific aspect and from a teaching perspective. In graduate school, I have extensively studied my field of research and learned the skills associated with my work; but by volunteering with CNSI Education, I have been exposed to new nanoscience phenomena with hands-on experimental work that I would not have otherwise received. Further, while I interact with teachers who attend the workshop, I hear what it is like to be an educator for K-12 students. It has been interesting to hear and learn the different techniques used in comparison to those I use in my classroom as a teaching assistant for chemistry courses at UCLA. Every time I volunteer for a workshop, I greatly enjoy the experience and conversations with teachers.
INFEWS trainees Sophia King and Natalie Kashanchi (left-right) volunteering for the NanoDay with CNSI Education’s Director, Rita Blaik. Source: CNSI YouTube video.
Another program held by CNSI Education is the Nanovation Competition, which aims to give middle and high school students in the Los Angeles area the opportunity to develop an innovative product and gain exposure to the world of entrepreneurship. Students working in small groups submit a proposal highlighting an unmet need and how the technology they plan to develop will help solve the problem. The graduate student mentors, like myself, in this program work with CNSI educators to select the most viable ideas. Each selected team is paired with one to two graduate student mentors and meet weekly to discuss their progress and challenges. The graduate student mentors guide their students in understanding current research, explaining complex topics, and providing support with finding resources. For my first Nanovation Competition, I worked with the team Composite Ventures, made up of five students from Westminster High School, to focus on developing a carbon fiber wrap for reinforcing concrete to prevent construction failures.
I was very happy to see the excitement and hard work these students put into their product and business. The students drove the research and product development as my role mainly was to ensure the science was physically possible. For the financial planning model aspect of the projects, graduate student mentors and their student mentees are provided with a one-day crash course on entrepreneurship hosted by UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Professor George Abe. During this time, students are taught the principles of entrepreneurship and what makes for a good product, but most importantly, how to sell their product to investors. This is key for the students, as at the end of the program, they present their technology and financial plan to a panel of judges that includes UCLA faculty, CNSI staff, and venture capitalists. In a “Shark Tank” format pitch, each team presents their technology, highlighting the nanoscale science behind their ideas followed by a Q&A from the judges. After all competing teams have presented, the judges discuss to select the winners who receive $2,000 for classroom supplies.
While the team I mentored may not have won first place in the Nanovation Competition, I firmly believe the students, my co-mentor and graduate student Charlene Salamat from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and I learned a lot about entrepreneurship and what it takes to develop a product. Seeing the progress that the students made each week was very rewarding as they constantly surprised us with their abilities to think critically and creatively about their material design and the science behind it. To watch the product pitch given by my team Composite Ventures in 2020 highlighting their excellent work, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KK7jtIe53c.
To learn more about the CNSI Education Outreach Program, please visit: https://cnsi.ucla.edu/education/.
Natalie is part of the 2019-2020 INFEWS program cohort and a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA. Her research focuses on silica nanoparticle-based materials for improving building energy efficiencies.
The blog is part of the INFEWS Social Media Series.