REU Site: Frontier Physics and Astronomy Research with Technical Presentations

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award supports the REU site at the University of California - Los Angeles. The main objective of the program is to encourage students, including women, underrepresented minorities, and students from institutions with limited research facilities to pursue careers in physics, astrophysics, and science in general. The program is aimed at a geographically and culturally diverse group and thus students are recruited nationally and special effort is made to target 4-year institutions, historically black colleges and traditional women's colleges. The program's activities include at its core a 10-week research project under the supervision of a UCLA faculty member. The projects span the various fields represented in the department (including plasma physics, condensed matter physics, accelerator physics, high energy physics, nuclear physics, astrophysics, astroparticle physics, and biophysics), and vary from year to year as different faculty members volunteer their time. The intellectual merit of this program is rooted in the close student-faculty interactions as they work together on one of a rich selection of cutting-edge projects. These research experiences have been supplemented by other auxiliary training such as a machine shop workshop, an ethics workshop, a Physics GRE prep course, and a weekly faculty seminar series.