On Friday and Saturday, April 5th & 6th, four Cozad High Students had the privilege to attend a Women in Science convention in Lincoln with Ms. Schacher and Ms. Wilkins. CHS students that attended included Betzaida Utrera, Courtney Jensen, Morgan Mraz, and Gabriela Vazquez. This is an opportunity provided to students who want to interact with career and academic professional women in science, meet current undergraduate science students and other high school students who are interested in science, and discover countless professions as diverse as biologists, geologists, engineers, food scientists, computer scientists, and those in the medical fields.
Friday, we got to tour the Food Innovation Center, Greenhouse Innovation Center, and the Nebraska Innovation Studio at the Nebraska Innovation Campus. After the tour the ladies were able to talk to faculty and students representing UNL STEM majors at the department displays. We had the privilege of Dr. Mark Button, Dean of UNL joined us at our table for the banquet. After the banquet Dr. Georgia Jones and Dr. Judy Wu-Smart engaged in a "fireside" chat about their respective fields of science and their journey as a scientist.
Saturday the ladies participated in two workshops. The first workshop was Physics and was using virtual reality to view the earth. This was led by a couple graduate students that had created the VR game that allowed you to explore our earth and view earth’s magnetic field, the aurora borealis and particles from the sun coming in and being captured by the earth magnetic field. The second workshop was Fisheries and Wildlife. During this workshop the ladies got to dive into the exciting world of wildlife population biology and learn hands-on mark-recapturing techniques using tiny bean beetles and nail polish to gain insight into population dynamics and ecological interactions.
After lunch the ladies then headed to the UNL Beadle Center Labs. They got to work with a UNL researcher and do 4 labs, one of them being an oil extraction lab. They took 6 grams of potato chips (About 3 regular sized chips) and through a process extracted the oil. They may never look at chips the same after that lab!
