NEWS
Uranium Team Mentors Underrepresented Students
During the month of July 2014, the NM EPSCoR Uranium Transport and Site Remediation component team mentored three minority undergraduate students at UNM by providing hands on experience on a geochemical extraction experiment of mine waste to understand desorption chemical concentrations and kinetics. The students, Chris Hirani (Central New Mexico Community College and Alliance for Minority Participation/ Summer Community College Opportunity for Research Experience (AMP/SCCORE) student), Ernesto Echeverria (Florida International University), and Fernando Echeverria (Florida International University) helped the group develop a plan for the experiment and ran the experiment throughout July. The students gained hands on experience with sieving samples, weighing samples, making reagents, making analytical standards, keeping an organized lab notebook, sample dilutions, and data analysis.
In addition, the students were exposed to analytical instrumentation including X-Ray fluorescence, Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, and X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometry. The results from the experiment were presented by Chris Hirani at the AMP/SCCORE poster session held at UNM at the end of July.
