Project SEED wins national award
Illinois State University’s Project SEED has been nationally recognized by the American Chemical Society (ACS) as the Outstanding Project SEED with the Chemluminary Award. They received the award at the 238th national ACS meeting in Washington, D.C.
Project Coordinator David Cedeņo said the SEED (Summer Experience for Economically Disadvantaged high school students) has been occurring at Illinois State for the past seven years. The program provides paid summer research experiences with chemistry faculty who volunteer their time to mentor participants for eight weeks in the summer.
Cedeño said that faculty mentors are willing to spend many hours of summer time with SEED fellows because they recognize that such an effort motivates and has an impact on future career goals of the participants.
"The best reward we as faculty have is to see that a few years later, many of the SEED fellows are enrolled and graduating from college, something that some of them, due to their economical limitations, had not considered an option," Cedeño said.
Thirteen Chemistry faculty, including David Cedeño, Gregory Ferrence, Christopher Hamaker, Shawn Hitchcock, Marjories Jones, Craig McLauchlan, Pilar Mejia, Richard Nagorski, Steven Peters, Robert Quandt, Frank Shaw, Lisa Szcezepura and Sharon Weldon, have mentored 43 high school students from Chicago and Bloomington-Normal over the past seven years. The program has been funded by ACS, the National Institutes of Health-Bridges Program, the College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost, Department of Chemistry, Research and Sponsored Programs and Strem Chemicals.
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