Education & Outreach

Some 750 seventh- to 10th-grade girls spent the day learning about computer coding, plasma science, artificial intelligence, and other subjects through numerous hands-on activities at the PPPL Young Women’s Conference in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) at Princeton University.

The annual conference brings girls from all over New Jersey, together with parts of Pennsylvania and Delaware, to take part in more than 40 activities, meet female scientists and engineers, and learn about cutting-edge science.

“I love it,” said Caroline Balick, an exhibitor from AI4All at Princeton University, a non-profit organization seeking to increase diversity in the artificial intelligence field. “It makes me so happy seeing all these girls walking around interested in science.”

The idea is to spark girls’ interest in science and change that statistics that show women still lag far behind men in the STEM fields. While 58 percent of all bachelor’s degrees are earned by women, only 36 percent of the degrees are in STEM. While 60 percent of social science occupations are occupied by women and 48 percent of life sciences, women represent only 26 percent of computer and mathematical science occupations and only 13 percent of engineers, according to the National Science Foundation.

Deedee Ortiz, a program manager in PPPL’s Science Education Department who organized the conference, said the girls’ engagement was evident. “There was a tremendous amount of enthusiasm,” she said, “They loved all of it. They had two hours at the hands-on session and they were disappointed they had to stop.”

PPPL booths at the exhibition hall at Princeton’s Frick Chemistry Laboratory included one by the Women in Engineering group where girls could learn about magnets and circuits, exhibits offering hands-on plasma experiments, and a booth staffed by PPPL’s Emergency Services Unit where students could try on firefighting gear.

In addition to hands-on activities, the students were treated to an eye-popping chemistry show by Kitty Wagner, of Princeton University’s chemistry department. They also listened to a panel discussion by three early-career women scientists. Tammy Ma, a plasma physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Ignition Facility, delivered the keynote speech, which focused on her facility’s research into creating fusion energy to generate electricity from a process called inertial confinement fusion.

More than 50 volunteers from PPPL, Princeton University, and numerous science organizations made the event a success by serving in numerous roles, including exhibitors, group leaders, and registration helpers. “This is the 18th year that PPPL has done a young women’s conference,” noted Andrew Zwicker, head of PPPL’s Office of Communications and Public Outreach. “Every year is better than the year before. That doesn’t happen without the amazing work of our volunteers.”

Lightning has struck twice, and in the same place. For one week in August for the second straight year, a cohort of graduate physics students came to Princeton for the annual Graduate Summer School (GSS) in Plasma Physics at PPPL. The students learned about low-temperature plasma, computational methods, turbulence, and plasma diagnostics in courses that were also live-streamed over the internet. They took part in a poster session and gave oral presentations about their research at week’s end.

“Summer is a special time,” said Arturo Dominguez, PPPL’s Science Education Senior Program Leader and one of the week’s organizers. “It’s when PPPL hosts undergraduate interns and physics professors, and now graduate students. It’s really nice to show off what we are doing here and have people take that back to their home institutions and maybe help develop their research further.”

Plasma, the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that naturally occurs stars, lightning, and the aurora borealis, is used in PPPL experiments to produce fusion, the mashing together of nuclei to create massive amounts of energy. Scientists are seeking to produce on Earth fusion, the process that lights the sun and stars, for a virtually inexhaustible supply of power to generate electricity.

The students came from a wide range of universities, including the Georgia Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College, North Carolina State University, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They were at an early stage of graduate study from a wide range of physics backgrounds.

“This week, I learned that I like things I didn’t even know existed,” said Liona Fan-Chiang, a graduate student in the applied science and technology program at the University of California, Berkeley. “I come from an experimental background so I thought I would like learning about diagnostics the most, but it turns out I really liked the computation section. It’s a field that I haven’t thought through before.”

The sentiment was echoed by Enrique Segura, who is beginning a master’s program in physics at California State University, Los Angeles. “If it weren’t for this program I would never have learned about this material,” he said. “The PPPL summer school is very helpful to students whose home institutions don’t have plasma physics programs.”

The program was also a chance for the students to meet other people in their field and explore partnerships. “I was just discussing collaborations with one of the other students here,” Segura said. “This summer school really builds community.”

The program also provided a glimpse into plasma physics research being done outside Princeton. “As with last year, my favorite part was the poster session,” Dominguez said, “because that was when I could see what they were all working on; they are doing some really interesting research all around the country.”

Physics Professor Hillary Stephens came to a three-day workshop at PPPL hoping to find plasma physics experiments she could bring back to the classroom. Students at her two-year school, Pierce College Fort Steilacoom in Lakewood, Washington, typically aren’t exposed to research experiments.

Stephens and eight other faculty members from across the country took part in the Minority Serving Institution (MSI) Faculty Workshop in Plasma Physics at PPPL, which provided a crash course in plasma physics and hands-on experiments the teachers can use in their own classrooms. “I know just giving them the opportunity to do this is nothing they’ve ever had before,” Stephens said of her students. “I definitely think it will inspire them. I’m hoping they’ll get excited.”

The program, in its third year, aims to create a more diverse pipeline into the fields of plasma physics and fusion energy by introducing the subjects to faculty at institutions that primarily serve underserved minorities — black, Hispanic, and Native American students — and women.

“I think this program is immensely valuable,” said physicist Arturo Dominguez, senior program leader in science education, who runs the workshop. “It gives them a good framework for including low-temperature plasmas in their curriculum. It’s a way of getting plasma physics to students who would normally not encounter it.”

Faculty in the MSI workshop toured the Laboratory, learned about plasma demonstrations in the Science Education Laboratory, and participated in experiments. These ranged from using electrodes to create plasma in vacuum tubes and charting the results when increasing the pressure and voltage, to using a spectroscope to determine the gas used in plasma and its temperature.

Stephen Babalola, a physics professor at historically black Alabama A&M University in Huntsville, Alabama, learned about the workshop when Dominguez gave a physics seminar there. Babalola hopes to use plasma demonstrations and experiments to attract more students to the physics program, which has only 20 majors out of a student population of more than 6,000.

“It’s hard to get the student population that the school serves to major in physics,” he said. “They didn’t have enough exposure to it in high school. One of the most important things is to actually just excite students and that’s where these demonstrations come in.”

Workshop participant David Schaffner, a plasma physicist and physics professor at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, said the experiments would help him promote plasma physics. “I feel like a soldier trying to fight the good fight to get plasma physics recognized,” he said. “It’s a great motivator. This is serious research.”

Promise Adebayo-Ige, a chemical engineering major at the University of Pennsylvania, has been fascinated by fusion energy since he was in high school. He came to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) PPPL for a chance to do research in the field and spent his spare time training for his school’s soccer team and studying for graduate school entrance exams.

Barbara Garcia, a physics and mathematics major at Manhattanville College, learned to be resourceful when she was applying to colleges as a first-generation U.S. citizen and a first-generation college student. She put those skills to work as a summer intern working on a liquid centrifuge device invented by PPPL physicists who study angular momentum, the momentum of a rotating body, in astrophysical plasmas. Applications of the centrifuge range from nuclear material separation to separating fluids in the pharmaceutical and food industries.

These are two examples of the 45 students who spent their summer doing hands-on research side-by-side with scientists and engineers at PPPL. Participants included students in the DOE Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI), and Community College Internships (CCI). Both are nationwide programs funded by the DOE’s Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists (WDTS) office within the DOE’s Office of Science.

PPPL also hosted several high school interns as well as future engineers taking part in a new engineering internship at PPPL that replaces as program that existed a few years ago. “The arrival of the interns the summer is a shot of excitement in the Laboratory,” said Steve Cowley, PPPL director. “They bring their resourcefulness and intelligence and like us, they’re excited by fusion. I enjoyed meeting every one of them.”

An advantage of the PPPL SULI program is that the Laboratory is small enough that students usually get to work closely with their mentors, said Andrew Zwicker, head of the Office of Communications and Public Outreach, which manages the program. “It’s very hands-on,” Zwicker said. “It gives students a chance to really dive deep into their projects.” He added that longitudinal studies of PPPL’s SULI students has found that the vast majority go on to attend graduate school and enter STEM fields.

PPPL kicks off apprentice program giving technicians the opportunity to “learn while they earn”

One day after Labor Day, four early-career technicians began four-year apprenticeships at PPPL and in the classroom. They receive competitive pay and benefits and will complete 8,000 hours of on-the-job training and 576 hours of related technical coursework in Mercer County Technical Schools subsidized by the New Jersey Department of Labor.

The apprentices signed on to become mechanical and electrical technicians at PPPL with top officials from PPPL, Princeton University, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the state of New Jersey looking on. They will work on building components for PPPL’s fusion energy and plasma experiments, which include the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U), a new Facility for Laboratory Reconnection Experiment (FLARE), which will study the astrophysical process of magnetic reconnection responsible for solar flares and the Northern Lights.

The program, which will continue over the next several years with new apprentices added each year, has won the 2019 Business Partner of the Year award from Mercer County Technical Schools.

Steve Cowley, PPPL director, launched the apprenticeship program after seeing similar programs work in England where he was head of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. “Technicians can fix anything, they can build anything, they play an incredible part in all aspects of our Laboratory,” Cowley said. “We want to train technicians to bring them on to be part of the PPPL family.”

Robert Asaro-Angelo, the New Jersey Commissioner of Labor and Workforce Development, called the apprenticeship program “a great example” of a partnership between government agencies and academic institutions. “This is a perfect time to be growing and expanding apprenticeships in New Jersey and to create pathways and have systems in place that will work even if the economy isn’t as strong as it is now,” Asaro-Angelo said. “This earn-while-you-learn model has implications for other sectors.”

The program will allow PPPL’s highly skilled veteran technicians to pass along their skills before they retire, said Valeria Riccardo, PPPL’s head of engineering. “Our technicians have a skill set that is quite unusual and we need to capture their skills and continue to do what we are doing for as long as we can,” she said.

The program will also enable apprentices to acquire technical skills for a higher purpose – developing fusion energy, said Shannon Swilley Greco, a Science Education senior program leader and an organizer of the program. “They can devote their careers, as so many of our technicians have, to something that will continue to benefit society well beyond their own retirement,” she said.