Your helper
Shelly Sommer can help you find and make connections with a number of offices, organizations, and programs that can forward your goals for outreach and engagement.
Partners
INSTAARs can call on a number of university and community partnerships to help conduct outreach. Partners can help you connect with communities, reach various audiences, fund students, and make your efforts go farther. Look for partners whose strengths complement your research team’s.
We have some established partnerships with community organizations, such as the Boulder Watershed Collective, Museum of Boulder, and the Colorado Girl Scouts. Some of the on-campus programs and offices that INSTAARs frequently partner with are listed below.
Campus partners
The Office for Outreach and Engagement
The CU Office for Outreach and Engagement has partnered with many INSTAAR researchers to get CU science into the hands of the public, particularly in Colorado. The dedicated staff has extensive resources that you can rely on, including mailing lists of educators throughout the state, contacts with dedicated teachers, and classrooms that can give you a positive outreach experience. They conduct the CU Boulder Outreach Awards and can fund graduate students for outreach efforts that match their needs.
Science Discovery
Science Discovery connects K-12 students and teachers to current CU science through unique, hands-on science experiences. All programs are designed to be highly interactive, engaging students in the scientific process while connecting them to the science and technology present in their everyday lives. Science Discovery impacts approximately 30,000 students, teachers and community members throughout Colorado each year. Suzanne Anderson has conducted CZO outreach through Science Discovery summer programs.
University of Colorado Museum of Natural History (CU Museum)
The CU Museum has a mission to contribute to knowledge of the natural world and the humanities through research, teaching, and public education. The Museum's collections number more than four million objects in anthropology and archaeology, botany, entomology, paleontology, and zoology and exhibition galleries are open to the public free of charge. They provide science kits and host outreach days on popular science themes (including snow, wildlife, and climate change) that are an affordable way to reach Boulder K-5 students and their parents.
RECCS (Research Experience for Community College Students (RECCS)
The goal of RECCS is to give community college students an authentic research experience at CU Boulder, ranked #1 in the world for geosciences. The program allows students to explore environmental or geosciences and gain the confidence to transition to a four-year program in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) disciplines.
UNAVCO Research Experience in Solid Earth Science for Students (RESESS)
A summer internship program for undergraduates, dedicated to increasing the diversity of students entering the geosciences. RESESS supports interns in summer research experiences at UNAVCO in Boulder, and provides professional development opportunities and graduate school application support.
Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU)
An NSF funded program for engaging undergraduate students in meaningful STEM experiences. Bill Bowman has coordinated the Research Opportunities for Undergraduates program at the Mountain Research Station each summer for several years.
Summer Multicultural Access to Research Training (SMART) through CU
This CU program offers 10-week summer research internships to 20-25 undergraduates from institutions nationwide. SMART interns conduct research projects in STEM fields under the guidance of a faculty mentor.
Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS)
An NCAR sponsored undergraduate-to-graduate program dedicated to broadening participation in the atmospheric sciences. It is built around a summer research internship, mentoring by top scientists, and a supportive learning community.
Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR/DLA)
CU SPUR is open to CU Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science Students only to gain experience conducting research.
UCAR Pre-College Internship
A UCAR research experience designed to introduce a diverse community of high school students to the world of atmospheric and related sciences.
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
UROP offers a range of flexible grant funding options for undergraduates and faculty to form partnerships for research and creative projects in all majors and fields of study. Funding is available to support undergraduates conducting research in INSTAAR labs, working on honors theses, partnering on a research project with a faculty member, or conducting independent research among other options. UROP's partner program Professional and Academic Conference Endowment (PACE) funds students to bring their work to conferences.
