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Video Report: GRITS Collaborative Project Conference at MTSU

February 18, 2013 By

The 2013 Girls Raised in Tennessee Science (GRITS) Collaborative Project Conference in MTSU’s Tom H. Jackson Building included a special workshop by Techbridge called “Role Models Matter” on Feb. 7. See a video report from the workshop below.

This year’s GRITS conference theme was “Building STEM Capacity for Girls in the South.” STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross is director of MTSU’s Women in STEM Center and a chemistry professor. Visit www.mtsu.edu/wistem to learn more about how GRITS and Expanding Your Horizons events encourage young women to pursue STEM careers. You also can visit mtsunews.com/aauw-grant-wistem to learn about a recent grant that will help fund more events like these at MTSU.

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AAUW grant helps MTSU center promote STEM for girls

January 31, 2013 By

The MTSU Women in STEM Center is using a $10,000 grant from the American Association of University Women Foundation to eventually expose at least 1,000 Southern girls to career possibilities in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math.

The AAUW Foundation awarded the 2012-13 Community Action Grant last year, with some of the funds used for upcoming events at MTSU, including the Feb. 6-8 Girls Raised in Tennessee Science — or GRITS — Collaborative Project Annual Conference.

The WISTEM Center received the grant to help bring awareness of STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — as a potential career option for young girls through events like Expanding Your Horizons conferences and organizations who bring awareness of STEM to the girls they serve.

Expanding Your Horizons, or EYH, conferences are held at MTSU, in Memphis and other Tennessee cities and across the South and the rest of the nation. They encourage girls and young women to pursue STEM careers.

“The grant will allow us to be able to share with others the success we’ve had” with the Expanding Your Horizon conferences, said Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross, an MTSU chemistry professor and director of the MTSU WISTEM Center.

“It’s important because we see girls who came to campus as fifth graders through our EYH now studying STEM in college.”

The Feb. 6-8 GRITS conference, which will be held in the Tom H. Jackson Building on campus, has a theme of “Building STEM Capacity for Girls in the South.”

Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross

It is open to individuals and groups with a strong interest in promoting STEM to girls. To register, visit http://tinyurl.com/MTGRITS2013.

“We recognize the need to raise awareness of STEM careers and to change the stereotypes about STEM jobs for women,” Iriarte-Gross said, adding that girls in middle and high school are “a large untapped source of STEM majors”

“We propose to build STEM capacity for girls in grades five to 12 by creating an EYH Consortium throughout the South,” she continued. “Through EYH, girls are empowered to become the STEM professionals of the 21st century.”

In the first year of the Expanding Your Horizons consortium, Iriarte-Gross said, organizers plan to provide professional development on best practices and lessons learned from AAUW research and from the EYH Network. There also will be workshop leader training with strategies on fundraising and increasing minority participation for both girls and workshop leaders.

“New EYH conferences will be offered in the second year with support from the EYH Consortium,” Iriarte-Gross added. “The target audience will be education institutions and/or community groups who want to provide STEM opportunities for girls, as well as girls in grades five to 12 who want to attend EYH.”

Iriarte-Gross said organizers want to establish new EYH sites and give move than 1,000 girls in the South the opportunity to explore STEM.

“The mission of our project is relevant to the AAUW mission because EYH is breaking down barriers and advancing gender equity for girls and women in STEM education and STEM careers,” she said of the grant provider.

Gloria Blackwell, director of fellowships, grants and international programs for the American Association of University Women, said the Community Action Grants “empower recipients to be leaders in their communities and in the lives of women and girls through innovative ideas and programs.”

“AAUW understands the power of local community impact to break through barriers for women and girls,” Blackwell continued, “and we put our money toward initiatives that align with our mission to advance equality for women and girls.”

AAUW has provided more than $90 million to 11,000 fellows and grant recipients since 1888.

Iriarte-Gross said one of the association’s early grant recipients was Marie Curie, the Polish-born physicist and chemist who worked primarily in France and became famous for her pioneering radioactivity research.

— Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)

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Game, experiments bring ‘100 percent fun’ to city schools students

December 4, 2012 By

Murfreesboro City Schools€™ coordinators Caresa Brooks, front left, and Kristina Maddux celebrate successful “€œBalloon Kabobs” during Education Day Dec. 4 in Murphy Center. (MTSU photos by Andy Heidt)

Above the noise of thousands of children talking and doing what youngsters do at a college basketball game, Cameron Burke said he was having “100 percent fun.”

Burke, 9, a fourth-grade student at John Pittard Elementary School in Murfreesboro, was having a grand time inside Murphy Center Tuesday morning.

A first-time visitor to the 11,000-plus-seat facility, Burke said he was having “lots of fun watching the basketball” on Education Day, a partnership between the Murfreesboro City Schools and MT Athletics, where the MTSU Lady Raiders met in-state rival Austin Peay in a basketball game and the students attended on a field trip.

Minutes earlier, Burke, his fellow students and their teachers in grades K-6 and administrators from 10 city schools witnessed science, technology, engineering and mathematics in action in two science experiments, “Balloon Kabob” and “Alka-Seltzer Bottle Rockets.”

“It was cool. I wish I could do that,” Burke said after watching both experiments.

The first pushed a wooden stick completely through a balloon without bursting it, and the second brought Alka-Seltzer tablets and water together in a small film canister to create a gas. With the lid on tight and canister turned upside down, the combustion blows the canister into the air.

All of the children were amazed by the STEM activity led by Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross, an MTSU chemistry professor and director of the MTSU WISTEM Center.

College of Basic and Applied Sciences Dean Bud Fischer and chemistry department chair Dr. Greg Van Patten assisted Iriarte-Gross with the experiments, along with senior anthropology major Kellum Everett and freshmen Sierra Shipley, a criminal justice major, and biology major Caleb Hough.

Students from two sixth-grade classes at Siegel Elementary and students from Scales Elementary also participated in the on-the-court exercises.

Later, Murfreesboro City Schools’ personnel performed math and letter-writing drills for the estimated 7,500 students in attendance.

Members of the Scales girls’ basketball team and their coaches also were part of the high-five tunnel for the Lady Raiders as the university team ran onto the floor of Hale Arena. Other fun activities during the game included a “chicken toss,” mummy game, musical chairs and dizzy bat race.

Other schools attending included Black Fox, Bradley and Cason Lane academies, Hobgood, Mitchell-Neilson, Northfield and the Discovery School at Reeves-Rogers.

Josh Calbaugh, MT Athletics director of marketing, said he hopes this will be the first of many Educational Days to bring area schools’ students to campus.

— Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)

MTSU freshmen Sierra Shipley and Caleb Hough perform the “Balloon Kabob” science experiment in front of several thousand Murfreesboro City Schools students Dec. 4 during the Education Day basketball game between the Lady Raiders and Austin Peay.

Nearly 7,500 Murfreesboro City Schools students enjoy a field trip to MTSU’€™s Murphy Center for the Lady Raiders’ Dec. 4 Education Day game against Austin Peay.

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Women-in-science advocate brings national perspective to MTSU

February 22, 2012 By

One of the nation’s top young women in science, who also is an advocate for women in the STEM fields, will be making a public speaking appearance at MTSU on Wednesday, Feb. 29.

Alice B. Popejoy, a Public Policy Fellow at the Association for Women in Science in Alexandria, Va., will present the 2012 MTSU National Women’s History Month Women in Science Invited Lecture at 7 p.m. in Room N116 of the Cason-Kennedy Nursing Building.

Alice B. Popejoy

Popejoy, the inaugural Phoebe S. Leboy Public Policy Fellow and writer and publisher of AWIS in Action! Advocacy and Public Policy Newsletter, will discuss “AWIS in Action! Perspectives from Capitol Hill on Women in Science, Technology and Engineering.”

The event is free and open to the public. Off-campus visitors should note that nearby construction may limit parking opportunities for the lecture.

Popejoy is a California native who graduated with honors in May 2009 from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., with bachelor’s degrees in biology and French. She will discuss her experiences as a young woman in science and as an advocate for women in the science-policy community in Washington, D.C.

“Although they are still in the minority, more and more women are entering STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields in the United States, but many institutions and research settings still cater to the white male majority,” Popejoy writes in her abstract for her talk.

“AWIS champions efforts to broaden participation of women and underrepresented groups in STEM and promotes institutional transformations to support a more diverse and flexible scientific workplace.”

Sponsors of Popejoy’s visit include the National Women’s History Month Committee, Women’s and Gender Studies 4205, MTSU Women in Science and Engineering, the Nashville Section of the American Chemical Society, Housing and Residential Life and the MTSU Women in STEM Center.

– Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)

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Aerospace Testing Alliance funds MTSU STEM, robotics programs

February 6, 2012 By

Aerospace Testing Alliance, the operating contractor for Arnold Engineering Development Center in Tullahoma, Tenn., recently made donations to MTSU programs promoting science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Shown below is a presentation by Philip Stich, ATA deputy general manager, of a $1,000 check to Dr. Judith Iriarte-Gross, MTSU chemistry professor and director of the MTSU Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, or WISTEM, Center. Also pictured are, from left, WISTEM advisory board members Dr. Walter Boles, chairman of the University’s Department of Engineering Technology; Kathy Nichols, manager specialist in ATA contract administration at Arnold Air Force Base in Tullahoma.; and Dr. Kathy Mathis, associate professor of engineering technology and coordinator for MTSU’s environmental science and energy technology concentration.

ATA photo courtesy of Rick Goodfriend

ATA photo courtesy of Rick Goodfriend

ATA also made a $500 donation to the MTSU’s NASA robotic program. In the photo above, the ATA’s Stich presents the check to MTSU engineering-technology majors Jordan Qualls, Kristen Zaloudek and Aaron Thompson and ET chairman Boles.

– Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)

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‘Madame Curie Speaks’ to MTSU, public Oct. 5

September 23, 2011 By

Marie Curie makes a rare, and first, appearance at MTSU on Wednesday, Oct. 5, as part of an interview and question-and-answer session on the 100th anniversary of her receipt of the Nobel Prize for chemistry.

Lee Rennick

The 6:30 p.m. appearance by Madame Curie, also known in local theater circles as Lee Rennick, is open to the public as well as the MTSU community. It will be held in the first-floor reading room area in the James E. Walker Library. A reception will follow in Room 475.

A modern journalist, played by speech and theatre professor Dr. Kaylene Gebert, will interview Rennick’s Curie in a sketch titled “Madame Curie Speaks.”

Marie Curie, circa 1911

“Marie Curie will be coming from 1911, talking about her life and work,” Rennick explained, noting that attendees will be able to ask their own questions of Curie. The scientist was the first woman to earn a Nobel Prize and the first person to win in two categories—physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.

Rennick is executive director of the Business Education Partnership Foundation at the Rutherford County Chamber of Commerce, where she conducts programs for K-12 teachers and students about applying school curricula to the work world.

In her free time, Rennick writes plays and teaches improvisation to middle- and high-school students. She has been in several community theater productions and has played “Ruthie” for the Daily News Journal’s “Ruthie Awards,” which she created, and Maude Ferguson, the first public-health nurse in Rutherford County, for the 2010 opening of Middle Tennessee Medical Center.

The Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Center at MTSU, the Nashville local section of the American Chemical Society, the MTSU Chemistry Society and MTSU’s Women in Science and Engineering are co-sponsoring the event.

—  Randy Weiler (Randy.Weiler@mtsu.edu)

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