REU Site: Advancing Chemistry with Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration - Chemical Sciences at CSU

This Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site award to Colorado State University, located in Fort Collins, CO, supports the training of 10 students for 10 weeks during the summers of 2023-2025. In this program, funded by the Division of Chemistry, participants pursue collaborative research projects across all flavors of chemistry to understand how posing fundamental research questions can be translated to addressing real world problems in collaborative environments. Participants also take part in a professional development and ethics training program, with a focus on science communication and preparation for graduate school or industrial careers. Through independent research projects and workshop and seminar series, this site broadens participation in STEM. Individual research projects for students involved in this program will connect the relevance of our science to current societal challenges, spanning from the environment to energy to defense to human health. Participants in this program will perform research with a team mentored by two faculty mentors on collaborative projects amongst 23 faculty mentors. We will augment the fundamental research experiences with activities directed toward scientific professional development, including writing workshops, career panels, presentation opportunities, and the continuation of our recently developed scientific ethics component. This site is partially supported by the Department of Defense, in partnership with the NSF REU program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.