Student's Research SOARS to New Level

Summertime is often a busy time for students preparing for careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. When properly leveraged, opportunities are abound for students to develop research skills and projects that will advance them to the next level. This is exactly what Eugene Cody has done.

Cody, an undergraduate American Indian Studies major at Haskell Indian Nations University (and enrolled member in the Hopi tribe), was recruited to participate in the summer of 2013 Haskell Environmental Research Studies (HERS) Institute. During this time he developed a research project examining the air quality associated with the burning of coal in the homes of the native Hopi people in northern Arizona and to identify solutions to the resulting problems (air quality, climate change, water use, and human health).

As a follow-on to his research project Cody and his cohort of HERS interns took a one-week field trip to the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado where they conducted experiments in air quality testing. They followed up the research by presenting their findings to the NCAR community.


At the conclusion of the trip, Cody was invited to apply as a protégé to the Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science (SOARS) program conducted through NCAR. "My time at NCAR was very fulfilling and I applied" he explained.

Cody was accepted as to the 2014 SOARS summer program and will spend ten weeks conducting original research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) or at laboratories of other SOARS sponsors. By the end of the summer, protégés will prepare scientific papers and present their research at a colloquium. To help protégés succeed academically and professionally, SOARS offers each protégé up to five mentors: a research mentor, a writing mentor, a computing mentor, a coach, and a peer mentor. Research shows that this comprehensive, multi-dimensional mentoring is a key contributor to the continued success of SOARS protégés.

Cody's upcoming SOARS internship will take his air quality research to the next level. He will be working with the Institute for Mathematics Applied to Geosciences (IMAGe) at NCAR where his project will consist of using atmospheric inverse modeling to apply to carbon flux estimation problems.

Kansas NSF EPSCoR would like to congratulate Mr. Cody for the success he has leveraged from his opportunity at the HERS Institute.