College Outreach - Workforce Initiative (CO-WIN)

Mag Lab scientist Ke Han (far left) meets students at his August 2009 lecture at North Carolina A&T State University.

The Magnet Lab proudly offers this program, a series of lectures designed to promote diversity in future generations of scientists, engineers and educators. Scientists, engineers and educators from our three locations travel to women's colleges, historically black colleges and universities, and other minority-serving institutions to tell undergraduate audiences about the wide range of career development opportunities available at the Mag Lab in collaboration with Florida State University and Florida A&M University. They also regularly attend the joint annual meeting of the National Society of Black Physicists and The National Society of Hispanic Physicists.

The lectures are interdisciplinary and fully funded by the Magnet Lab. All expenses are paid by the program.

Strong relationships with institutions that serve predominantly members of underrepresented groups have grown out of CO-WIN visits. Among the most successful is the lab's partnership with Prairie View A&M University in Texas, which resulted from a 2005 CO-WIN visit by lab scientist Eric Palm. The visit led to a $1.5 million collaborative grant from the National Nuclear Security Agency to increase the involvement of minority scientists and their students. With the grant funding, Prairie View was able to purchase a high-field magnet for its faculty, and the Mag Lab renovated a lab space and equipped it with a 16-tesla magnet. Completed in 2007, the Open Doors Lab provides space for underrepresented students, post-docs and young faculty to do research in collaboration with the Magnet Lab's Extreme Conditions Group.

Magnet Lab scientist Arthur Edison visited Claflin University, in Orangeburg, S.C., in 2009 and started a partnership that has grown each year. As a result of the initial visit, Edison now provides NMR training to Claflin faculty and students on the school's new 700 MHz spectrometer. In 2010, a Claflin student applied for and was accepted into the lab's Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, and received a scholarship to attend an NMR Metabolomics workshop held at the University of Florida. And this year, two more Claflin students will participate in the REU program to build on their NMR training.

There are no currently scheduled lectures. For a list of previous lectures, please see our schedule of past programs.

If you are interested in scheduling a presentation at your institution, please contact Dragana Popovic at dragana@magnet.fsu.edu or (850) 644-3913.