A CURE Embedded in a Summer R25 Research Experience "How Metal is Your Campus"

Since 2019, West campus has hosted an NIH funded R25 site in Environmental Health Sciences, the New College Environmental Health Science Scholars.  As a part of this summer program for undergraduates, student participated in professional development, workshops, seminars, mentored research in laboratories, and a CURE embedded into the program.  The CURE was designed to leverage our place, the West campus, give students the opportunity to develop their own hypotheses and experimental protocols, learn additional techniques, and work together as a group.  The posters that span the 4 years of the project are shown below (2020 summer program was cancelled due to COVID).  Students developed hypotheses based on discovering if there were differences in heavy metal accumulation around sites on the ASU West campus and in doing so learned additional techniques, such as field sampling techniques, soil sample preparation, and XRF.  Their posters are below.  Ken Sweat was the mastermind behind this project and oversaw this CURE through all four iterations. 

Ken Sweat, Jennifer Hackney, and Pamela A. Marshall presented on this work at the 2023 ASMCUE Meeting.