Outreach

The Tessonnier group strives to foster diversity in STEM education and promotes science and engineering for all. Please contact us if you share the same values and want to know more about our research. We offer internships to high school students and teachers, undergraduates, and visiting scholars of all backgrounds. We also develop new K-12 educational tools together with science teachers of the Des Moines school district.

CREATING NYLON : Non-Renewable Fossil Fuels Vs. Renewable Biomass.

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The Tessonnier group is involved in several summer internship programs, including NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), Research Experience for Teachers (RET), Young Engineers and Scientists (YES – for high school students), and US Department of Energy Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI). Please contact us if you want to join our group for the summer!

Our group (PI and students!) advocates for a broader participation of women and minority students in STEM. We partner with the Des Moines school district and regularly go to classrooms to talk about our work and how it impacts the society and future generations. We are also involved in various events including science fairs, the Taking the Road Less Traveled conference through the Program for Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE).

We design short videos that illustrate how Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) concepts are used in our research and impact everyone’s life. The videos help to connect classrooms with state-of-the-art academic research, and society. They are developed together with high school science teachers in order to address their specific educational needs.

Together with high school science teachers, we develop new lab activities and disseminate them in the Journal of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society. Check out our first paper with Sarah Curry (NSF-RET intern) on reaction kinetics:

Kinetics, Reaction Orders, Rate Laws, and Their Relation to Mechanisms: A Hands-on Introduction for High School Students Using Portable Spectrophotometry
J. M. Carraher, S. M. Curry, J.-P. Tessonnier, J. Chem. Educ. 2016, 93, 172-174. [link]

The Tessonnier group is devoted to diversity and equality. This means fostering a welcoming, inclusive, and non-discriminating environment for everyone and supporting the presence of women, people of color, or the LGBTIQ community in STEM research and education. Therefore, Dr. Tessonnier, together with his spouse, has participated in the Margaret Sloss Women’s Center “Who Needs Feminism” campaign and has undergone the Iowa State University Safe Zone Program Training.

We are also deeply involved in communicating with broader audiences about nanomaterials, catalysis, the production of fuels and chemicals from plants. Contact us!

What’s So BIG About Tiny Science?
Science Center of Iowa, April 9, 2013
Presentation on the progress and applications of nanomaterials, followed by an open forum discussion
http://www.sciowa.org/learn/cafe-scientifique/