Over the past two days I’ve given talks at Indiana University and Penn State University. It’s refreshing to speak with so many bright students actively working to make their research more accessible and relevant to broad audiences. Today I’m very much looking forward to spending some time with the Fellows involved in Penn State’s CarbonEARTH program–a terrific initiative supported by the NSF GK-12 grant:

The CarbonEARTH (Educators and Researchers Together for Humanity) Fellowship Program teams Penn State Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) graduate students with elementary and middle school science teachers from Pennsylvania’s Philipsburg and Harrisburg school districts. The CarbonEARTH program uses the interdisciplinary theme of carbon, broadly construed, as a unifying platform for student investigation, discovery, training and education.

I tremendously enjoy these campus visits and sense a growing awareness among young scientists that public engagement beyond academia will be necessary to influence and inform the global decision-making process. If the individuals I’ve been meeting are representative of where the science community is headed, the times they are a-changin’.

And I remain optimistic.