Summer program gets teachers on research TRAC

Purdue University Calumet professor Neeti Parashar mentors Morton Junior High School teacher Melissa Winchell during her eight week Teacher Research Associates program at Fermilab.

After eight weeks at Fermilab, middle school teacher Melissa Winchell is an expert at asking questions. It's an ability that has helped her go from programming novice to proficient Web developer during her summer in Fermilab's Teacher Research Associates program. And it's a skill she is eager to impart to her students at Morton Junior High School in Morton, Ill.

"When I talked with the high school teachers who were also spending the summer at Fermilab, there was the one thing they said that students really needed to learn in middle school-how to ask good questions," she explained.

Winchell's work at Fermilab underscored the value of inquiry. Her mentor, Professor Neeti Parashar, from Purdue University Calumet, who spent her sabbatical at Fermilab, handed Melissa a challenging mission: restructuring a jumble of CMS Forward Pixel Web pages into an orderly, user-friendly system. Through weeks of persistent effort-and plenty of questions-she succeeded, creating a resource Parashar said the CMS collaboration will use frequently.

Meanwhile, at sites across the laboratory, the summer's four other TRAC participants spent six to eight weeks completing projects of their own. The 28-year-old TRAC program attracts mostly local residents but is open to teachers nationwide. Overall, said organizer Harry Cheung the TRAC experience offers educators "a chance to take part in research, to find out how science is an ongoing process, and to take that back to their schools."

While this year's participants wrapped up their laboratory work in early August, several hope to extend their Fermilab connection into the school year. Parashar plans to visit Winchell's science classes, and Cheung expects some of the teachers will arrange field trips to Fermilab.

Parashar is glad to maintain those ties, adding to her already rich outreach activities.

"Fermilab is very fortunate to have teachers working alongside the scientists here. Melissa has done an outstanding job of developing the Web site," she said. "The teachers' presence can be rejuvenating for scientists here, and I'm sure they will do a great job conveying a passion for physics to their students."

-- Rachel Carr

In Memoriam: Priscilla Duffield

Priscilla Duffield

Priscilla Duffield, Robert Wilson's first secretary, died on July 21 at her home in Norwood, Co. She was 91.

Duffield joined Fermilab, then National Accelerator Laboratory, on Nov. 6, 1967, when the laboratory's offices were based in Oak Brook. She served as founding director Robert Wilson's first secretary until she left the laboratory on Dec. 31, 1972.

While she preferred the title secretary, Wilson referred to Duffield as his assistant director in his Golden Book, "Starting Fermilab."

Prior to working at the laboratory, she served as secretary to Ernest Lawrence, whom the Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories were later named after; for Robert Oppenheimer, during and after he worked on the Manhattan Project; and for Roger Revelle of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

A data deluge swamps science historians

From the Wall Street Journal,
August 28, 2009

As paper trails fade, digital material grows in size and complexity; how to decipher those 80-column punch cards

London - In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library's first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today's discoveries and better understand the people who made them.

His task is only getting harder. Scientists who collaborate via email, Google, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are leaving fewer paper trails, while the information technologies that do document their accomplishments can be incomprehensible to other researchers and historians trying to read them. Computer-intensive experiments and the software used to analyze their output generate millions of gigabytes of data that are stored or retrieved by electronic systems that quickly become obsolete.

"It would be tragic if there were no record of lives that were so influential," Dr. John says.

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