YPC's Engineering Outreach Inspires Middle School Students

The community outreach efforts within AIChE have continued to connect students from around the country with the chemical engineering profession. At the Annual Meeting in November in Atlanta, a group of young professionals teamed up with the Societal Impact Operating Council to host over 70 middle school students from the Gifted and Talented Program in the Atlanta Public School District for an engineering outreach event at Georgia Tech.

Members of AIChE helped to lead three hands-on activities throughout the morning:

·Tony Butterfield from the University of Utah returned from our Fall 2013 San Francisco program to execute an experiment focused on carbon capture.

·Graduate students from Auburn University led a hydrogel experiment where students could observe the properties of polymers and learn about how they are formed.

·Young professional leaders led a Make Your Own Lip Gloss activity sponsored by Inolex Chemical Company and developed by members of the Delaware Valley Local Section in Philadelphia.

Over lunch, the keynote address was given by Dr. Paula Hammond of MIT. The students were captivated by the research her graduate students are currently working on and the applications to the real world. Not only did Dr. Hammond describe her professional career, but she was able to show the students how parts of her childhood molded her to choose engineering as a career field, motivating them to pursue higher education in a field that fuels their passions.

Following the keynote, the students were sectioned into small groups for tours of the Georgia Tech Marcus Nanotechnology Building state-of-the-art clean rooms, led by graduate students from the Institute of Electronics and Nanotechnology. These graduate students explained the complex and innovative research that is conducted by researchers at the university in these immaculate clean rooms. It was an extremely unique space for middle school students to view in-person and observe professional scientists and engineers at work.

This wildly successful event is to be followed up by 2015 Spring Meeting High School Outreach Event: Being an Engineer-Creating a World That Works, led by the Fuels and Petrochemicals Division of AIChE on Tuesday April 28^th from 9am-1pm at UT-Austin. Astronaut and Chemical Engineering Professor Al Sacco returns as the keynote speaker for what should be an exciting program!

For more information, or if you have interest in volunteering at the event, please contact Giselle Schlegel, Gkschleg@syr.edu.