Note to Editors: The event is closed to the public but media are invited to attend. The morning lectures will be held at Fiske Planetarium.
The top high school science students representing many of the 50 states will visit the University of Colorado at Boulder Feb. 13 to meet with CU-Boulder's top researchers, including Nobel laureates and MacArthur "genius grant" recipients.
The program is sponsored by the American Junior Academy of Sciences, which annually selects the top high school student in the sciences from every state. Each student and a teacher escort will travel to CU-Boulder for a full day of meetings and presentations with top CU scientists in conjunction with the American Academy of Sciences Meeting being held in Denver Feb. 13 to Feb. 18.
The students will attend presentations by CU-Boulder Physics Nobel laureates Professor Carl Wieman and National Institute of Standards and Technology Senior Scientist Eric Cornell, who is also a professor adjunct at CU-Boulder. They also will meet with CU MacArthur Fellows Professor Norman Pace, physics Professor Margaret Murnane and computer science and linguistics Professor Daniel Jurafsky.
Those three CU-Boulder professors have won MacArthur Fellowships since 2000. The MacArthur fellowships include a $500,000 stipend with no strings attached.
The Junior Academy of Sciences tour was organized by CU Professor Christine Yoshinaga-Itano of the speech, language and hearing sciences department.
The students also will meet with Ryan Patterson, a freshman electrical engineering student at CU-Boulder from Grand Junction, Colo. Patterson, who designed a computerized glove to help deaf people communicate with hearing people, won more than $2,000 in high school science competitions last year and was invited to visit and display his invention to the Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm in 2002.Ìý
As winners of high school science fairs across the country, the students also will present their research results at AAAS at the Colorado Convention Center.
After lunch, the students and their escorts will split up to visit various research labs. One group will visit the speech, language and hearing sciences center for presentations by Professors Kathryn Arehart, Don Finan and Gail Ramsberger on auditory perception, speech and motor development and aphasia, a loss of mental capacity to speak or understand words, usually resulting from a head injury.
A second group will visit the molecular, cellular and developmental biology faculty, including Professors Mike Klymkowsky, Min Han and Brad Olwin, who are studying gene expression, cell signaling and the developmental biology of muscles.
A third group will visit the planetarium to hear Professors Michael Shull and Jim Green discuss astrophysical theories and tools, and for a presentation by planetarium Director Doug Duncan on space, including his exploration using the Hubble Space Telescope.
A fourth group will visit the environmental, population and organismic biology department. Professors Barbara Demmig-Adams, William Adams, Jeff Mitton and Deane Bowers will talk about photosynthesis, evolution and insect defense mechanisms.
A fifth group visiting anthropology will hear Professors Dennis Van Gerven, Bert Covert and Doug Bamforth discussing Nubian mummies, early primates in North America and the making of stone tools by American Indians.
Group six will visit the psychology department to hear Professors Tiffany Ito, Tim Curran, Louise Silvern and Irene Blair talk about infant cognitive development, learning and memory, and child abuse research.
Group seven will hear clinical psychology Professors Linda Craighead, Serge Campeau and Donna Caccamise speaking on obesity and eating disorders, stress in psychiatric disorders and cognitive science.
Group eight will go to the computer science and engineering department to visit Clayton Lewis and John Hansen of the Center for Spoken Language Research, which stresses state-of-the-art computer models.
A ninth group will visit with Karen Chin, CU Museum curator for invertebrate paleontology and Professor Charles Stern of geology, who will discuss volcanism in Latin America. All tours will end at 1:55 p.m.