REU Site: Dynamic Urban Environmental Systems and Sustainability in Newark, NJ

将建立一个新的项目，为城市地区占主导地位的少数民族本科生提供城市环境科学方面的研究经验。每年将从花园州路易斯·斯托克斯少数族裔参与联盟和其他类似项目中招募12名学生，在纽瓦克的罗格斯大学和附近的实地考察地点进行为期8周的暑期研究体验。美国贫困的市中心地区是STEM最大的未开发人力资源来源。该计划将通过展示研究在公共健康和生活质量方面与他们的生活和社区的相关性和重要性，鼓励具有这一背景的学生学习环境科学。学生们将面临相互作用的环境系统的动态复杂性的挑战，以及试图开发使此类受影响的系统可持续发展的幽灵。我们的目标是将这一挑战转化为对其进行研究的愿望，并最终为市中心的年轻人创造一条进入STEM研究职业的途径，使他们成为个人的兴趣。虽然学生将在环境地球物理、地球化学、生态学、生物地球科学和地理空间分析等不同领域进行研究，但对学生来说，所有的努力都是相互关联的，因此他们可以理解每个项目的重要性和相互作用。项目将着眼于土壤中无机污染物的地球化学及其对植物生长的影响、磷肥和其他肥料在矿物中的径流和固存、污染物在浅层地下水系统中的移动和自然衰减以及空气污染物沉降物对自然系统的影响等。该计划将特别利用附近高度受影响但现在受到保护的Hackensack Meadowland作为项目的独特自然实验室。研究体验将被整合到学生的教育体验中，以统一它们，而不是让它们成为独立的体验。这将通过一系列讲习班来完成，这些讲习班还将把研究和教育经验与研究生教育和职业联系起来。研究经验、大学教育、研究生学习和职业生涯的结合将构成模式路径的基石。

A new program will be established to provide research experiences for predominantly underrepresented minority undergraduate students from urban areas in urban environmental sciences. A cohort of 12 students per year will be recruited largely from the Garden State Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation and other similar programs for an 8-week summer research experience at Rutgers University in Newark and nearby field sites. Impoverished inner city areas in the United States represent the largest untapped source for human resources in STEM. This program will encourage students from this background to pursue environmental sciences by showing relevance and importance of the research to their lives and communities in terms of public health and quality of life. The students will be challenged by the dynamic complexity of the interacting environmental systems and the specter of attempting to develop ways to make such impacted systems sustainable. The goal is to transition this challenge into a desire to pursue research in it and ultimately to create a pathway for inner city youth into STEM research careers by making them of personal interest. Although students will conduct research in distinct areas of environmental geophysics, geochemistry, ecology, biogeoscience and geospatial analysis, all efforts will be interrelated for the students so they can appreciate the importance and interplay of each project. Projects will look at the geochemistry of inorganic pollutants in soils and their effect on plant growth, phosphate and other fertilizer runoff and sequestration in mineral species, the movement and natural attenuation of contaminants in shallow groundwater systems and the effect of air pollutant fallout on natural systems among others. The program will especially utilize the nearby highly impacted but now protected Hackensack Meadowlands as a unique natural laboratory for projects. The research experiences will be integrated into the student educational experiences to unify them rather than having them be stand-alone experiences. This will be done through a series of workshops which will also connect the research and educational experience to graduate education and careers. The integration of research experience, college education, graduate studies and career will form the cornerstone of the model pathway.