Honors Science Seminar Students Visit Labs in California

Students in the Honors Science Seminar just spent two days in California, touring research laboratories at Stanford University and UC Berkeley, the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The students met with researchers who are investigating cosmic evolution, the properties of dark matter, heavy elements and electron interactions in space; and they toured the buildings that house the linear accelerator, the cyclotron, cleanrooms and supercomputers. At the universities the students visited researchers who are doing work in their fields of interest, such as forest ecology, water purification, nanoscale systems and immunology.

“Talking to those respected researchers allowed the students to really understand both what current research is similar to their own work and how they can extend their own research in the future,” said Marion Zeiner, Director of Scientific Research.

One of the Berkeley researchers who met with the students was Episcopal alum, Julia Rogers ’12, who is designing computer simulations to enhance our understanding of protein interactions. Julia now works in Gilman Hall, just down the hall from the lab that previously belonged to Nobel Laureate Glenn Seaborg. It is there that Seaborg discovered plutonium and subsequently worked on the Manhattan Project.

Students included:
Jackson Ravis, 19
Marco McGowan, 19
Jack Barksdale, 19
David Li, 19
Spencer Huie. 20
Ashton Body, 20
Mabel Smith, 20
Krystal Shi, 18
Isaac Zhang, 16