A Visit from the Secretary

photo by PPPL's Elle Starkman

Yesterday, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu visited the lab for the morning.  He's a Nobel-prize winning physicist and a fascinating person.  His visit included a talk to all staff about the importance of developing new energy sources and then he went on a tour that included our major experiments and the Science Education Laboratory.  I thought his talk was excellent, he eloquently painted a bleak picture of where the Earth is headed if we do nothing and offered his ideas on what we can do. After his visit, he headed down to Philadelphia to announce the Energy Efficient Building HUB and I headed down to that with PPPL's Assistant Director Adam Cohen.  The press conference was packed, the governor of PA and the mayor of Philadelphia spoke, and there were plenty of tv cameras and reporters.  (I'm running the Workforce Development component of the HUB.) Just a typical day in the life of a science edumacator...!

Live Television - it's shocking and cold!

The Inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival, hosted by Lockheed Martin, is the country’s first national science festival and descends on the Washington, D.C. area in October 2010. Opening on 10/10/10 with a concert of amazing science songs performed by over 200 children and adults at the University of Maryland, the Festival promises to be the ultimate multi-cultural, multi-generational and multi-disciplinary celebration of science in the United States. The culmination of the Festival will be a free, two-day Expo on the National Mall and surrounding areas that will feature over 1500 fun, hands-on science activities and over 50 stage shows and performances on four stages. The Festival is a grassroots collaboration of over 500 of the nation’s leading science organizations. The Festival has a bipartisan Honorary Congressional Host Committee with over 100 Members supporting its efforts. 

Last week, the organizer of the event asked me to help promote it with him on a live talk show in DC.  We had 5 minutes for him to talk about the expo and for me to wow everyone with fun science.  I managed to shock one host, splash liquid nitrogen on the other so I thought it went really well!

Here's a link to the video clip.

A new education initiative - green jobs and building efficiency

Last spring, a team from Penn State visited PPPL to ask if we would like to join their proposal to the Department of Energy for transforming the Philadelphia Navy Yard into a test bed for decreasing the energy consumption of commercial buildings by 50%.  I showed them our Science Education laboratory and talked about how we measure the success of our programs.  A few days after the visit, I was asked to lead the Workforce Development component of the proposal.  A bunch of meetings, even more conference calls, plenty of emails, and the proposal was submitted.  A few weeks ago we found out that our proposal was funded.  It's a new component to our education activities as well as an exciting opportunity.  You can read about it in this press release.