Awards

The Remote Girls Tinker Academy is a two-week program designed to engage and inspire middle school students through Maker principles to encourage the exploration and development of technical, mathematical, and artistic abilities. For Summer 2020, thirty middle school students from across Sonoma County have been selected by CTEF/CWISE to participate in this hands-on program to be taught remotely by SSU professor and student assistants. They will participate in a variety of activities including coding, modeling, crafting, sewing, and building.

This award contributes to the Seawolf Scholars Critical Needs Fund.  It provides emergency funds to foster youth students for needs such as food, shelter, and health care, as these are the largest barriers to foster youth completing a four-year college degree.  In doing so, it helps to eliminate external stress and burdens so students can focus on thriving in their education.

The purpose of project is to expand "making" across the State of California with four strategic components: supporting leadership activities and expanding the maker space(s) at SSU, convening a higher education maker leadership symposium bringing in makers from across the CSU and other two and four year colleges and universities to create a vision for making in higher education and to identify best practices, allocating resources for the creation of maker face to face course identifying higher education making spaces along with K-12 making spaces to be integrated into the Maker Certificate

The Anthropological Studies Center (ASC) will assist CALFIRE with archaeological, historical, or ethnographic research; archaeological records checks; correspondence with Native American tribes and other Native Americans; archaeological field inspections and surveys; site boundary definition and mapping work; project reviews; impact assessments; resource evaluation excavations; surface collections; site record preparation; development of recommendations for the protection and management of tribal-cultural, archaeological and historical resources; cultural resource monitoring; and preparatio

Sonoma State University is participating in a grant sponsored by the Irvine Foundation with five other California State University campuses that are Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI) to support the use of chatbots to increase retention, engagement, and career exploration for CSU students, particularly under-represented minority and Pell-eligible students.

The Anthropological Studies Center (ASC) will conduct resources studies at Bouverie Preserve, Cypress Grove Preserve, Tom’s Point Preserve, and Martin Griffin Preserve in Sonoma and Marin counties. This project involves a cultural resources review and field study of each preserve and recordation of any resources identified.

 The seven (7) TRiO Upward Bound and Upward Bound Math & Science Programs at Sonoma State University serve 493 pre-college (9th – 12th grade) students who attend targeted high schools in Sonoma, Napa, Mendocino, and Lake Counties.  Participants attend a rigorous Saturday Academy and six-week Summer/STEM Academy along with participating in test preparation, financial aid, and college application workshops.  Students also attend numerous college campus tours and frequent social and cultural field trips.  Participants are prepared to enroll, persist, and graduate from t

There is a growing understanding that adipose tissue releases hormones (adipokines) that help regulate metabolism, immune function and reproduction. This study examines changes in blubber gene expression and blood concentrations of adipokines in naturally fasting elephant seals, examines their relationship to immune markers and reproductive hormones, and will provide novel information on how body condition influences health and reproduction in wildlife.

Working with Project Management at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, SSU personnel will support press communications, outreach events and scientific illustrations on behalf of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory scientific missions. Dr. Cominsky is a scientific Co-Investigator for both missions, and also serves as press officer. Aurore Simonnet's illustrations of previous Fermi and Swift high-energy discoveries have included covers of two issues of Science magazine, and one issue of Nature.

Sonoma State University Professor Matthew Clark leads a NASA-funded project to monitor animal biodiversity, with the help of collaborative researchers, students, and volunteers also known as “citizen scientists”.  The project, known as Soundscapes to Landscapes (S2L), relies on remote sensing, which is an important tool for long-term monitoring of biodiversity.  S2L combines bioacoustic data collected by citizen scientists with satellite and environmental data to monitor bird diversity in Sonoma County, California.