STEM News

On the first day of fall term, Professor Jennifer Wolff stood in front of her Introduction to Biology class and showed an innocuous slide of her research with microscopic worms. “You won’t know what all of this means yet,” she told them, “but it’s the kind of work I specialize in.”

Among the many reasons Carleton enjoys a strong reputation in the sciences is its penchant for project-based learning. Research is built into the undergraduate experience here—something students at other colleges might not experience until graduate school.

“The teachers here do a lot of research and put you in an experimental mindset,” says Malavika Suresh ’18 (Maple Grove, Minn.), a chemistry major. “You can take as many lecture classes as you want, but actually doing research teaches you in such a different way.”

Tsegaye Nega’s personal mission to bring affordable, efficient cooking stoves to Ethiopia grew into a massive interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together a diverse group of Carleton faculty, staff, and students.

“We now have a place that is a huge benefit not just to animal species, but also as an academic resource to students and faculty members in art, biology, geology, archeology, and anthropology.”

Computer science students at Carleton are tackling real-world problems, helping to change the world through their problem-solving skills.

Tsegaye Nega used to watch helplessly as Carleton students struggled to make sense of the needs in Ethiopia during OCS trips. Now, he’s aiming to give back.

“We need people who encompass multiple perspectives to tackle things like cancer, global climate change, and artificial intelligence—and we want to foster our students’ ability to do that kind of work.”

Carleton team again part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration to identify a second gravitational wave event in the data from Advanced LIGO detectors. 

Today, more than ever, instruction in science and the liberal arts mutually reinforce each other. Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—or STEM, as the disciplines are called collectively—pervade the national dialog. What’s missing in many conversations about education, work, and life is the broader integration of STEM, replete with the many ways of knowing and understanding our world.

“Woodstock for physicists” is how Carleton physics professor Nelson Christensen describes the Washington, D.C., press conference at which scientists announced their groundbreaking discovery of gravitational waves.