Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart students run their experiment at 15-ID.

NSF’s ChemMatCARS hosted a team with four high school students and one teacher from Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart to participate 2022-23 Exemplary Student Research Program (ESRP). The goal of ESRP is for each high school team that establishes a scientific research project that can use a large facility such as Advanced Photon Source (APS) to perform the experiment. To prepare for the experiment, Professor Yu-Sheng Chen and Dr. Tieyan Chang gave them weekly online lectures on Synchrotron Radiation and X-ray Crystallography. As a result, the students learned about the synchrotron facilities and focused primarily on crystallography diffraction data process and data modeling with scientific software.

The Scared Heart team performed a crystallographic project at 15-ID-D X-ray beamline on March 11th and 12th, which included preparing samples, collecting, processing, and modeling data.

Pictured front row from left, Dr. Binhua Lin (NSF’s ChemMatCARS), HEHS students, Shraddha Zina, Ariana Correia, and Parita Shah, Kimberly Simms (NSF’s ChemMatCARS); second row from left, Dr. Wei Bu and Dr. Mrinal Bera (NSF’s ChemMatCARS), HEHS student Amber Dellacqua; back row from left, HEHS students Sam Darr, Jake Walsh (Undergrad from University of Chicago), Wayne Oras, Jr. (HEHS faculty), and HEHS student Darshan Desai.