In partnership with the CCI for Synthetic Organic Electrochemistry, the Minteer group at the University of Utah has been building new community partnerships in order to extend electrochemistry knowledge through science outreach programs. In doing so, the Minteer lab hopes to raise interest in electrochemistry. As with the scientific community at large, diversity data within the CCI itself indicates that the percentage of both women and underrepresented minorities (URMs) decreases as chemists progress in their careers. Currently, the five groups making up the CCI contain post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Their respective groups show similar diversity challenges to the rest of the country with diversity decreasing as education increases. Their undergraduate student researchers are 47% women and 7% URMs their graduate student researchers are 35% women and 5% URMS, and their post-doctoral research fellows are 15% women and 3% URMs. For URMs, the pipeline is obviously failing at the pre-college level, thus to increase participation, we will reach out to the local communities by building collaborations with local K-12 schools to introduce electrochemistry into the curriculum through a combination of CCI traveling kits and CCI workshops. The Minteer lab has developed several travelling kits with different electrochemistry experiments. These traveling kits are laboratory kits for middle school and high school teachers. These kits provide the pedagogical plan for lab exercises involving electrochemistry, along with all equipment and consumables required for a typical 30 student class. The kits focus on introducing electrochemistry to middle schoolers through batteries, solar cells, and electrolysis, and then applying that basic electrochemistry knowledge toward electrocatalysis and electrosynthesis in high school lab exercises. In addition to primary schools, the Minteer group has partnered with other community groups focusing on underserved populations who may not traditionally have access to scientific outreach programs: including Sudanese and other refugee youth, and incarcerated youth and adults. This talk will focus on the successes and challenges involved in building community partnerships, developing and testing new laboratory experiments suitable for a wide age range, and adapting these programs to special populations (e.g. incarcerated youth).

Beyond lemon batteries: Broadening the extent of electrochemistry outreach

2019 Spring National Meeting

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