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Steppingstone MAgnetic Resonance Training Center

The United States is behind many other countries in providing educational opportunities for students in math and sciences. Students usually do not have the opportunity to experience an actual scientific environment until college or graduate school. The SMART Center seeks to provide an avenue by which students interested in science can, early in their careers, participate in a real research environment using advanced instrumentation.

The purpose of SMART Center is to provide students the opportunity to use advanced instrumentation to engage in scientific research of their choosing. The staff of the SMART Center assists students in learning how to use the instrumentation, what kinds of scientific questions can be asked using this instrumentation, how to design the experiments and interpret the data, and how to present their results to a general audience.

The SMART Center differs from an academic research environment in one fundamental way – at the SMART Center, the professor's primary focus is on the student's ideas while in an academic research lab, the research ideas come from the professor.

Two graduates of the SMART Center program (a middle school and high school student) have presented their work in poster format at the Rocky Mountain Conference in Analytical Chemistry (2011,2012). One student has a publication i na referred journal.

This program is unique; nothing like this has ever been tried before. No other primary or secondary school has access to an EPR spectrometer, especially in conjunction with the background of the SMART Center staff. The participants in the SMART Center are forging a new path in science education and the science experience.

References: www.smart-center.org (other publications and book chapters will be inserted here).