Expanding Access to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Collaboration with the Faculty And Student Teams (FAST) Program

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is one of the first, and certainly the most long-lived, large-scale observational survey collaboration in modern astronomy. For over 25 years, SDSS has been mapping the night sky with cutting edge instrumentation and then releasing all of the accumulated data, at all stages of data processing, to the broader astronomical community. Through innovative Educational and Public Outreach programs, SDSS has also reached into classrooms and imaginations, again making all materials free to access by the public. While the data products are released to the public, the planning and operations of the surveys are conducted by institutional membership, which is responsible for a large portion of the overall funding required for the project, and, as a result, participation in the SDSS collaboration is predominantly limted to large, research insitutions. While the demographic profie of research insitutions is becoming more diverse, the most diverse pool of astronomers can be found at smaller, less-research focused institutions. In an effort to broaden particiaption in SDSS, the Faculty And Student Teams (FAST) program pairs an SDSS insider with a faculty member at a minority serving institution (MSI). The faculty member organizes undergraduate teams to perform original research with SDSS data (ideally, non-public data) and the SDSS insider serves reduce barriers for participation, such as learning technical jargon or even staging custom data products (among others). The program comes with flexible funding support for the faculty and students. This presentaiton will highlight a successful FAST teams and provide sufficient information to bring new FAST teams on board in the future.