ARM joins students and professionals from around the United States for the country’s largest multidisciplinary and multicultural STEM diversity conference
The Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) held its annual National Diversity in STEM (NDiSTEM) conference from October 31 to November 2, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona.
During the event at the Phoenix Convention Center, college students and professionals participated in STEM research and career development sessions, as well as multicultural celebrations and traditions.
This was the first year that the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) user facility hosted an exhibit at NDiSTEM. Approximately 130 conference attendees stopped by the booth to learn more about ARM. Representatives shared introductions to ARM capabilities and instructions for accessing ARM’s freely available atmospheric data.
Booth visitors also received information on ARM’s upcoming Desert-Urban SysTem IntegratEd AtmospherIc Monsoon (DUSTIEAIM) field campaign in the Southwestern United States. DUSTIEAIM is scheduled to launch in the Phoenix area in April 2026.
Job and internship seekers who visited the booth learned about roles at the nine U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories that manage and operate ARM.
Information was also shared with booth visitors about DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships (SULI) and Community College Internships (CCI) programs. Through SULI and CCI, undergraduate students and recent graduates work with national laboratory scientists and engineers, assisting them on research or technology projects that support the DOE mission. In the summer of 2024, researchers mentored SULI interns working with data from ARM’s Surface Atmosphere Integrated Field Laboratory (SAIL) campaign. Applications are currently being accepted for the summer 2025 term of both programs.
ARM summer school is another way for students and early career researchers to get involved with the user facility. In the NDiSTEM booth, ARM provided information about its planned 2025 open science summer school in Alabama. Similar to past ARM summer schools, participants will learn new techniques for working with ARM data and high-resolution model output to study atmospheric processes, but this time, the focus will be on ARM’s new Bankhead National Forest atmospheric observatory.
“Through activities like the ARM summer school, we are trying to get early career researchers engaged with ARM,” says ARM Director Jim Mather. “We would like to make sure that students and early career scientists from diverse institutions are aware of these opportunities, and SACNAS was a wonderful venue to make new connections.”
In 2025, the SACNAS NDiSTEM conference will be held from October 30 to November 1 in Columbus, Ohio.
# # #ARM is a DOE Office of Science user facility operated by nine DOE national laboratories.