Courses
2010 NMNEN Courses
Biology 350: Nanobioscience. This class is designed for undergraduate students who are curious about nanoscience and who wish to learn about its applications for biological research, especially in biotechnology and medicine. The class combines lectures with student in-class activities and includes presentations by guest speakers. Class discussion focuses on understanding the significance of biosensors, molecular machines, and nanostructured materials for nanoscience research. Students receive guidance on how to apply for summer internships in nanoscience laboratories.Workshops
2010 NMNEN Workshop Nano(bio)science Workshop Scheduled for August 2010
-07/19/2010-
Title: "Nano-Ed-Materials Workshop"
Date : 08/09/2010
Time : 9am-3:30 pm
Where: Albuquerque Marriott Pyramid
Date : 08/09/2010
Time : 9am-3:30 pm
Where: Albuquerque Marriott Pyramid
The goal of the one-day workshop is develop a repository of nano(bio)science educational materials that can be made available to educators in 2- and 4-year colleges. Workshop participants are encouraged to bring teaching materials to share with other educators. The materials may include but are not limited to: powerpoint slides of lectures and research seminars, in-class exercises, lab-handouts and exercises, newspaper articles on nanoscience that will stimulate student interest, and course syllabi. Participants will have the opportunity to showcase their contributions. The workshop materials will be assembled after the workshop and made available to the participants at no cost via CD. Faculty, students, postdoctoral fellows, science writers, and government laboratory scientists are encouraged to attend. The workshop is free and lunch will be provided. Participation is limited to 35 on first come basis. To reserve a place, please register online.
2009 NMNEN Workshop Nano(bio)science Workshop Scheduled for September 2009
-08/07/2009-
The 2nd NMNEN Workshop for faculty and researchers who are interested in promoting nanoscience education in New Mexico will be held on Sunday 09/27 and Monday 09/28 at the Santa Fe Hilton .
The workshop is co-sponsored by NSF DUE CCLI 0633736 and the New Mexico Consortium.
AGENDA
The workshop is limited to 40 attendees and will be held as a satellite meeting to precede the CINT User Conference. Travel awards are available for participants who need assistance in order to attend both the workshop and the CINT User Conference.
Participating Institutions:
AGENDA
The workshop is limited to 40 attendees and will be held as a satellite meeting to precede the CINT User Conference. Travel awards are available for participants who need assistance in order to attend both the workshop and the CINT User Conference.
Participating Institutions:
- Austin Community College
- Central NM Community College
- Dine Community College, Shiprock
- Edmonds Community College
- Kennesaw State University
- Los Alamos National Laboratory
- Montana State University
- New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology
- NMSU - Alamogordo Community College
- NMSU - Dona Ana Community College
- NMSU -Grants Community College
- NMSU, Las Cruces Main Campus
- Santa Fe Community College
- Science Education Solutions
- The Jackson Laboratory
- University of Georgia
- UNM, Albuquerque
- UNM, Gallup Community College
- UNM-Los Alamos Community College
2007 NMNEN Workshop
New Mexico Nanoscience Education Lecture Series
Co-Sponsors:- National Science Foundation EHR DUE 0633736
- NMSU College of Engineering
- NMSU College of Arts & Sciences
- Jackson Laboratory Center for Genome Dynamics
| Wednesday - July 11, 2007 – 8 pm | ||
| Preparing Students for the US Scientific Workforce Location: Gerald Thomas 194 (Auditorium) Moderator: Dr. Jacob Urquidi, Professor of Physics, NMSU-LC |
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| 20:00 | Introduction to NMNEI Dr. Boris Kiefer, Dr. Vicente Lombraña, Dr. Elba Serrano, Dr. Jacob Urquidi New Mexico State University |
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| 20:15 | Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education in the U.S. Dr. Lisa Frehill, Executive Director, Commission of Professionals in Science and Technology, Washington D.C. Who will do science? When Berryman wrote her report of this title in 1983, there was a call for diversification of the science and engineering workforce. Since 1983, however, there have been some moves forward for under-represented groups—namely women and members of various ethnic groups—but the pace of this forward movement has greatly varied across fields. Women and under-represented minorities have also experienced the most difficulty in advancing in the professoriate to the highest ranks and at the most prestigious universities. Back in 1983, many of the solutions to the STEM workforce shortfall were cast within a framework of “fixing” women and minorities. Now, however, after more than two decades, that approach has revealed its flaws. In this talk I will review some of the data to date on the changing population of the United States, changes in STEM, and current issues in STEM pedagogy that underlie the kinds of cross-disciplinary, multi-level approaches reflected in the New Mexico Nanoscience Education Initiative. |
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| Thursday - July 12, 2007 – 3:30 pm | ||
| Current Topics in Nanoscience Location: Gerald Thomas 194 (Auditorium) Moderator: Dr. Boris Kiefer, Professor of Physics, NMSU-LC |
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| 15:30 | Opportunities in Nanoscience Research Dr. Neal Shinn, User Program Manager, DOE Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies Beyond the popular buzz, serious interest in science at the nanometer scale has grown considerably because of the perceived potential to beneficially impact almost every aspect of our lives. However, the enticing phenomena obtained by engineering materials at the atomic/molecular length scale will disappoint humankind if they cannot be exploited via technologies providing unprecedented functionality, performance and public accessibility. Hence we should consider the nanoscience questions that can enable solutions beyond any specific application. For example, understanding the fundamental limits and principles for the use of nanoscale structures to detect, transfer, and harvest energy with extreme efficiency or sensitivity would have immediate and broad ranging impact. Success in solving this and other nanoscience challenges will change not only what is expected of future technologies, but also the way in which they perform ever more complicated functions. The DOE Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies is operated jointly by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences. Sandia is a multi-program laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy under contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. |
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| 16:15 | Self-Replicating Nano-Materials and Minimal Protocells Dr. Steen Rasmussen, Los Alamos National Laboratory & Santa Fe Institute We review the basic ideas behind the Living Technology concept and argue that our ability to make more general self-replicating materials is the key challenge for realizing a new and better technology. Such a new technology is based on robustness, autonomy, local intelligence, self-repair, adaptation, and evolution, properties very different form the properties of current technology, properties this new technology share with living systems. The state of the art for self-replicating nano-materials is presented and recent experimental and computational advances made by our team is discussed. We discuss the observed reaction kinetics of information molecules that catalyze the metabolic production of containers, connecting the three key components of minimal living systems, the genes, the metabolism, and the container, and we further present the predicted life-cycle and long term dynamics of a fully functional protocell. We finally discuss the key missing scientific milestones our community needs to reach to realize self-replicating nano-materials and create life from scratch. This work has implications beyond science and technology as it touches on what it means to be alive as well as issues of ethical and cultural nature |
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| Thursday - July 12, 2007 - 7:30 pm | ||
| Enhancing Science Education through Collaborative Networks Location:Gerald Thomas 194 (Auditorium) Moderator: Dr. Vicente Lombraña, Regents Professor of Biology, NMSU-A |
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| 19:30 | Challenges for Science Education at Community Colleges Dr. Kamala Sharma, Professor of Chemistry, University of New Mexico-Gallup Community colleges in New Mexico play a very crucial role in education by providing post-secondary education to 55.5% of total higher education enrollees in New Mexico. Hence it becomes imperative that New Mexicans become aware of the challenges that the faculty members at the community colleges face in providing science education. The presentation will focus on those challenges based on personal experiences. Some of the challenges that a science faculty at a community college faces are: high attrition rates of students in science classes, teaching load, lack of interdisciplinary curricula in sciences, lack of resources available to faculty and students, lower wages of teachers, few rewards or incentives for faculty members, lack of incentives for students taking science courses, lack of employment opportunities for students, lack of mentors and role models for students, just to name a few. The purpose of the presentation is to initiate a dialogue among the educators to create ways to improve the quality of and strengthen science education and also to increase the number of students entering STEM disciplines. |
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| 19:55 | Integrating Biology and Physics in Education Dr. Scott Reese, Professor of Biological and Physical Sciences, Kennesaw State University, Georgia Modern biology has grown beyond a simple description of life around us. To be successful at answering questions about life, a biologist must be able to work with quantitative investigations into the foundations that govern evolutionary relationships. Thus, the greatest breakthroughs in the last half-century were by integrative biologists (e.g. Richard Axel or Linda Buck), those that understood how physics and chemistry give us explanations for much that we see in the living world. Unfortunately, students of biology often fail to see the connections between the sciences that they are required to take. They compartmentalize the information they are taught and often fail to bring previous learning with them from other course work. Thus, IBEAM, http://ibeam.kennesaw.edu/, (Integrating Biology Experimental Activity Modules with Introductory Physics) is working to create successful materials explicitly showing students where physics and biology intersect. These materials can be used in introductory physics courses (especially those populated by biologists) and in upper-division biology courses where the connections are most prominent. |
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| 20:20 | Video Conferencing and Web-based Tools for Long Distance Teaching Dr. Randy Von Smith, Center for Genome Dynamics, Jackson Laboratories, Maine The Center for Genome Dynamics created a course tailored to a group of high school students at Maine’s public science and math boarding school: the Maine School of Science and Mathematics 250 miles north of The Jackson Laboratory. Our students were prepared for conducting team oriented independent research by a lecture series that covered the core processes of Statistics, reading the scientific literature, writing a NIH grant proposal, Genetics, and Microarray analysis. Our teaching staff used video conferencing and web based e-meeting tools to conduct classes remotely. In this talk we will cover how we introduced core scientific principles to the students and the strengths and weaknesses of the distant learning methods tested. (Randy Von Smith, Deborah McGann, Keith Shockley, Shirngwern Tsaih, James Nadeau, Gary Churchill) |
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