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

将建立一个新的计划，为城市环境科学领域的城市地区代表性不足的少数民族本科生提供研究经验。每年将从花园州路易斯·斯托克斯少数民族参与联盟和其他类似项目中招募12名学生，在位于纽瓦克的罗格斯大学和附近的实地进行为期8周的夏季研究。美国贫困的内城地区是STEM人力资源最大的未开发来源。该计划将鼓励来自这一背景的学生通过展示研究在公共卫生和生活质量方面对他们的生活和社区的相关性和重要性来追求环境科学。学生将受到相互作用的环境系统的动态复杂性的挑战，并试图开发使这些受影响的系统可持续发展的方法。我们的目标是将这一挑战转变为追求研究的愿望，并最终为内城青年创造一条进入STEM研究职业的途径，使他们的个人兴趣。虽然学生将在环境物理学，地球化学，生态学，地球科学和地理空间分析的不同领域进行研究，所有的努力将是相互关联的学生，使他们能够欣赏每个项目的重要性和相互作用。项目将研究土壤中无机污染物的地球化学及其对植物生长的影响、磷酸盐和其他肥料的流失和矿物种类的固存、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对自然系统的影响等。该计划将特别利用附近高度影响，但现在保护哈肯萨克草地作为一个独特的自然实验室的项目。研究经验将被整合到学生的教育经验，以统一他们，而不是让他们成为独立的经验。这将通过一系列研讨会来完成，这些研讨会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整合将形成模式途径的基石。

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.