Research Experiences for High School Students

AMRI High School Summer Research Program. AMRI has maintained a Summer Research Program for high school students since 2002. During this time, over 140 students have participated from high schools from all over the Greater New Orleans area. This unique 8-week full-time experience allows students to work side-by-side in modern research labs with nationally/internationally recognized scientists. The research areas can vary widely but often involve aspects of chemistry, physics, materials science, engineering, psychology, and mathematics. The students are given their own research program or work as part of a larger team on a major focus of the host research group. These projects are exploratory giving the student experience in fundamental and applied research; recent projects have involved nanomaterials, sensor arrays, environmental remediation, 3-D printing, battery materials, catalysis, neuroscience, computer modeling, magnetic materials, and thin film deposition. Students not only work full time in the laboratory, but also participate in weekly seminars and tutorials in a number of areas including ethics, careers in materials science and related fields, effective management skills, laboratory safety, nanomaterials, electron microscopy, crystallography, magnets, and computational methods.

Historically, funding for this program has been varied. In the past, large major multi-investigator AMRI grants from DARPA, EPSCoR, and other sources included small funds to support this effort. More recently such funding sources have been limited, so the program has relied more on individual AMRI investigator grants (e.g. NSF) and AMRI's own resources to support 1 or more students. Most recently we have started a crowding funding campaign, looking to AMRI "alumni", business associates, faculty, friends and family to help support this important program. The summer stipend for this program is $2000 per student, where other costs for the program are covered by the PI's and AMRI.

This program has been very impactful over the years. While we have not been able to track all our participants, we know that several have gone on to obtain bachelor's degrees in the sciences and others have gone on to complete doctorates. Madalyn Radlaurer (Summer 2004) went on to complete a B.S. in Chemistry from Stanford University in 2008, a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Cal Tech in 2014, a postdoc at the University of Minnesota (2014-2017), and now she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at San Jose State.