NuSTEAM - Nuclear Science in Texas to Enhance and Advance Minorities

This is a new collaborative effort by four Texas-based minority serving universities that conduct an undergraduate traineeship project under the guidelines of the TBD-NP (Research Traineeships to Broaden and Diversify the Nuclear Physics community) program. The collaboration consists of the University of Houston (UH), University of Texas - Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), University of Texas – El Paso (UTEP) and Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU).

The University of Houston serves as a host for the summer program of the year-long traineeship. After completing a six-week summer course at UH, Brookhaven National Laboratory hosts the students for a two-week hands-on experience in the laboratory environment. The curriculum of the summer course focuses on developing a Nuclear Physics based skill set, which will be applicable to future professions in academia and industry within the Nuclear Physics field. Areas that will be covered in the course are low- and high-energy Nuclear Physics research, nuclear radiation applications in Space Science and Medical Physics, Instrumentation and Detectors, Electronics, Software Development, Analysis tools, Machine Learning, and finally Networking, Presentation Skills and Career Planning. Upon returning to their home institutions, the students are supported for the Fall and Spring semesters for 15 hrs/week, while working on a research topic chosen through the traineeship program. First-year topics include nuclear and high energy data analysis, neutrino and dark matter data analysis, phenomenological modeling of data from RHIC and LHC, radiation physics studies, machine learning applications in nuclear physics, detector development and calibration as well as electronics testing for new instruments. The program is presently funded for two years, but based on the overwhelming response to our initial solicitation from the Texas nuclear community we hope to initiate a sustainable effort in support of local minority undergraduate students.