PDP Teams and Teaching Sites

Teaching site: ASTRAL workshops for community college students at Lick Observatory

UC Observatories has expanded Lick Observatory’s education programs, including building the ASTRAL consortium of San Francisco Bay Area community colleges and Cal State campuses that have access to the observatory. Consortium activities include designing new educational activities for college courses and co-curricular programs; these activities involve undergraduates in working with Lick Observatory telescopes, technology, and data.

• Team 01 will refine and teach an activity on transiting exoplanets for a workshop to be held at Lick Observatory for community college students on June 27-July 1, 2027. 

• Team 02 will refine and teach an activity on transiting exoplanets for a workshop to be held at Lick Observatory for community college students on July 11-15, 2027. 

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants primarily from UC campuses with astronomy and similar backgrounds to join these teams.

Teaching site: Astronomy / physics lab courses at Bay Area colleges

UC Observatories has expanded Lick Observatory’s education programs, including building the ASTRAL consortium of San Francisco Bay Area community colleges and Cal State campuses that have access to the observatory. Consortium activities include designing new educational activities for college courses and co-curricular programs; these activities involve undergraduates in working with Lick Observatory telescopes, technology, and data.

• Team 03 will refine and teach an activity on apparent motion of celestial objects in the night sky for an astronomy lab course at Sonoma State University in Rohnert Park, CA, in early May 2027. 

• Team 04 will refine and teach an activity on emission and absorption spectra and Kirchhoff’s Laws for a calculus-based physics lab course at College of San Mateo in San Mateo, CA, in late April/early May 2027. 

• Team 05 will refine and teach an activity on Kepler's Laws and predicting solar system objects' orbits from multiple observations for an astronomy lab course at Hartnell College in Salinas, CA, in late April 2027. Note that participation on this team benefits from some computational background, as learners will work with orbit-fitting code.

• Team 06 will refine and teach an activity on apparent motion of celestial objects in the night sky for an astronomy lab course at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, CA, in mid-late May or early June 2027.

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants primarily from UC campuses with astronomy and similar backgrounds to join these teams.

Teaching site: AstroTech instrumentation summer school

AstroTech is a one-week astronomical instrumentation summer school held at UC Berkeley for upper-level undergraduates and early graduate students who are interested in careers in astronomical instrumentation. Students gain hands-on experience in optics and optical systems, and build community as they work in small teams to design, build, and test an optical instrument (spectrograph). 

• Team 07 will refine and teach an existing optics activity that will help to prepare students for their spectrograph-building activity during the summer school at UC Berkeley on June 21-25, 2027. 

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants from across the US who have backgrounds in astronomy, physics, and optical engineering to join these teams. 

Teaching site: University of Colorado, Boulder (CU Boulder)

• Team 08 will design and teach an astro/physics lab activity for incoming undergraduate students or for summer research students at CU Boulder in early summer 2027.  

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants primarily from Colorado-based campuses with physics, astronomy, and similar backgrounds to join this team.

Teaching site: Michigan State University program in Computational Math, Science, and Engineering

• Team 09 will refine and teach a computing activity for undergraduate summer researchers in computational science at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI in mid-late May or early June 2027. 

Relevant background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants primarily from the Midwest who have backgrounds in scientific computing to join this team. 

Teaching site: UT Austin Astronomy summer research preparation

The University of Texas at Austin supports a group of summer undergraduate researchers, who benefit from preparation and cohort-building at the beginning of the summer. 

• Team 10 will refine and teach an image sampling activity as an orientation for summer undergraduate research students at UT Austin in mid-late May 2027. 

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants primarily from Texas-based campuses with astronomy and similar backgrounds to join this team.

Teaching site: Kanu A Kupu summer bridge program at UH Hilo

Kanu A Kupu is a two-day summer bridge program designed for incoming students in the College of Natural and Health Sciences at the University of Hawai‘i at Hilo. Students gain hands-on experience in a STEM research-style activity. Team members have the option of serving on an informal panel about STEM pathways.

• Team 11 will refine and teach an activity on emission and absorption spectra, and how different kinds of spectra are produced. This activity will be taught at UH Hilo in mid-August 2027. 

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants primarily from Hawai‘i-based institutions with astronomy, physics, chemistry and similar backgrounds to join this team.

Teaching site: NSSC-LLNL Nuclear Security and Nonproliferation Summer School

• Team 12 will design and teach an activity on an aspect of nuclear risk reduction for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students who will participate in the summer school at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, CA. The summer school will take place on June 14-17, 2027. 

Background/experience: We are recruiting PDP participants from across the US who have backgrounds in physics/nuclear physics. US citizenship is required to participate on this team.