SALT LAKE CITY — On Tuesday, a community of refugee students, their families, scientists and educators celebrated an event three years in the making: the installation of five cosmic ray detectors atop the Department of Workforce Services’ Utah Refugee Center building in Salt Lake City.
“If you think about the sun, right, sunlight comes off of the sun, and we can see the light, right?" explained Professor Sara Braden, an assistant professor of teacher education and learning at Utah State University. “There's other forms of energy that we cannot see. So cosmic rays are one sort of type of energy released by objects like the sun, or if there's a star exploding somewhere that could release cosmic rays out into the universe.”
The detectors were built by nearly 60 participants in a program called “Investigating the Development of STEM-Positive Identities of Refugee Teens in a Physics Out of School Time Experience or "InSPIRE."
The three-year project funded by the National Science Foundation was a collaboration between the University of Utah, Utah State University, the Utah Department of Workforce Services Refugee Services Office, as well as the Dutch National Institute for Subatomic Physics (Nikhef), located in Amsterdam.
The data from the detectors will be recorded at the Utah Refugee Center building and then transmitted to the University of Utah daily.
The focus on refugees and immigrants was intentional said Tino Nyawelo, principal investigator of InSPIRE and a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah.
“One of the reason that I focused on refugees because of my own story,” Nyawelo said. "I left my country. And then when I ended up in Europe, then I was faced with many, many challenges culture, in educational things. And when those students came here, I see there's a lot of challenges that they're facing in the school system. They are not well represented in science and technology at all."
Nyawelo also pointed out that many refugee students tend to move around a lot which can affect and interrupt their education.
“So for them to succeed, they needed extra support than any other group, in my opinion," he said. "So that's why when we started this project, we focus on helping refugees and immigrants. But it's not only refugees, but we the program help many newcomers.”
According to Nyawelo, the partnering groups that put this project together along with the Utah State Board of Education received more funding from the National Science Foundation to train high school teachers in Utah.
