Photograph by Mark Garvin
Those students on campus this summer looked a little young because Penn hosted about 175 high school students for the Penn Summer Science Academy. The four-week program lets high school students use high-tech equipment under the guidance of Penn professors in labs for molecular biology, environmental science, mathematics and materials science.
Here five of the materials science students examine a high-density polymer cylinder they stretched in Penn's Mechanical Testing Center. They are working under the guidance of Charles D. Graham Jr. (right), emeritus professor of materials science and engineering, and Dr. Alex Radin (not shown), who created and runs the center.
The students are among 23 who chose materials science for their summer program. The students spent three afternoons each week in materials science labs, including one week in the Mechanical Testing Center, where they made and crushed concrete, and tested the properties of soda cans, plastics, metals and alloys. In the other labs they studied ion scattering, polymers, and diffusion in metals.
Along with the students in the other three subjects, they worked with computers, studied issues in science and explored Penn's facilities and scientific equipment. The students, whose outstanding PSAT scores qualified them for the program, came from high schools across the United States and from other countries. This is the second year that the 9-year-old Pennsylvania Summer Science Academy has offered materials science and environmental science.
Many of the students return to Penn as undergraduates after their Summer Science Academy experience, says program coordinator Owen Ballard, who credits the program for also attracting participants' friends and siblings to Penn. Organized by the College of General Studies, it receives support from the National Science Foundation.
-Libby Rosof
