Past Successes in Education and Outreach

UD CHARM is home to faculty and staff with a passion for engaging our local communities in science and engineering innovation.  Below are a few of our past projects that have influenced CHARM’s education program development:

Future Faculty Workshop
NSF-funded, 4-year program (2016-2020, Epps-PI) in soft materials to improve diversity in professoriate-sustainable networks, illuminate the ‘unwritten’ rules of professorship, build confidence in navigating processes, and provide training in immersive interview simulations.

NSF PIRE Outreach
Bio-inspired science outreach programs at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, with expansion to the Delaware Museum of Natural History.

UD ACS Project SEED site
Summer research activities for economically-disadvantaged high school juniors and seniors, and the development of mentor/mentee relationships with graduate students, which will be expanded through our activities with TeenSHARP Delaware.

UD Lending Library
Experiments and demonstration instructables and materials that can be used in K-12 classrooms to expose students to fundamental engineering concepts, with UD CHARM expanding the Library by testing modules with Delaware’s Tarbiyah Islamic School.

2019 Future Faculty Workshop participants (Prof. Thomas Epps was PI of a recently completed grant to improve diversity in the soft materials academic pipeline)