Aria Ballance - Recipient of the 2024 Curie Club Outreach Award
We are proud to annouce that Aria Ballance was the recipient of the 2024 Curie Club
Outreach Award! This award will fund ($100-1,000) graduate students' projects to bring
chemistry to the community. As chemistry graduate students, we are passionate about
this cool science, but sometimes, we fall short when engaging with the public. Think
about ideas to show people how fun and exciting Chemistry is. This is your chance
to make them real, and as a plus, these kinds of projects look good on resumés as
they show your ability to lead.
A brief decription of Aria's proposal: "Chem Quest! A fun, new outreach program where UofU chemistry students will visit local 6th grade classes and help them design and execute their own science experiment! Every student will be given the same materials and experimental setup but will each choose a different variable of the experiment to change. Over the course of one month, students will learn the basics of how to set up an experiment, think of a hypothesis, make observations, collect data, and at the end, share their results with their classmates. By setting up and carrying out an experiment themselves, they will get a taste for what it is like to be a scientist!"
Aria's interest in bringing the joy and excitement of learning science and conducting experiments to sixth graders is admirable. The Public Engagement Committee and the Curie Club were impressed by her outreach application, which not only engages youth in experiencing what it is like to be a beginning scientist but involves other University of Utah students in conducting this outreach program and interacting with budding scientists.
We will be announcing this award at the Chemistry Awards ceremony this spring.
Congratulations Aria!
Check out more opportunities here!