LEAF and National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) Division of Science
has helped High School students to do Scientific Research
Press Release
Lizette Olmos Godfrey, 202-213-1293 mobile
National – The Latino Education Advancement Fund (LEAF), the SULI program at Stanford University, and NAOJ partnered to allow high students to work on a year-long scientific research project. This project allowed students from the United States to join the important scientific research.
Five high school students from Puerto Rico and one from California worked hard all year and resulting in being accepted and featured in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. Their learning experience has been tremendous: they learned how to use Mathematical software, how to run the python script, how to transform from magnitude to energy fluxes, and how to fit data with a model in a multiparametric space.
“The students from LEAF were super helpful. They gathered many data points from hundreds of papers and many Circular Network Notices,” said Dr. Maria Giovanna Dainotti. “They helped organize tables and performed part of the light curve fitting (around 20%). This was a long process that engaged them since last summer. All the hard work, in the end, paid off.”
After the initial summer training period, the students officially embarked on the project in the fall (November 2020), and they continued working until summer 2021.
“Thank you Dr. Dainotti for allowing us to collaborate with your project. Our Latino students deserve opportunities like this to learn hands-on scientific research” said LEAF Founding President & CEO, Dinorah Olmos. “Our high school students need to have this high-level type of exposure.”
For more information, please visit our website at http://leafedu.org.
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LEAF is a non-profit organization established in 2016 with the mission to provide Latino parents with the information, knowledge, and skills needed to navigate their local educational systems.