[074] Registration deadline nears for Oct. 28 girls’ math-science event at MTSU

MURFREESBORO, Tenn. — Online registration will end Friday, Sept. 29, for the 21^st annual Expanding Your Horizons in Math and Science at MTSU, and middle school and high school girls need to act quickly to secure their place.

Expanding Your Horizons, or EYH, will be held from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 28, on campus. The registration fee is $20.

EYH helps girls and young women investigate science and mathematics careers, talk with women in math and science, attend a science and math workshop with their peers, participate in hands-on activities and meet girls interested in math and science.

Scholarship assistance is available. To register, go to http://www.mtsu.edu/eyh/register.php. A link to a parent/guardian release form is included.

EYH at MTSU is available for Midstate girls in middle school (grades 5 to 8) and high school (grades 9 to 12). Up to 250 middle school girls and up to 100 high school girls are welcome to attend the event. Lunch is included in the registration fee.

Workshops are being planned for teachers and parents wanting to attend. There is a $25 registration fee.

Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an associate professor of astronomy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, will be the keynote speaker.

As a first-generation college graduate within a family that sometimes lived below the poverty level, Holley-Bockelmann has a deep interest in broadening the participation of women, minorities and first-generation college students in science.

She is co-director of the Fisk-to-Vanderbilt Master’s-to-Ph.D. Bridge Program designed to mentor a diverse group of graduate students to develop the skills needed to succeed as a doctoral scientist.

Holley-Bockelmann joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2007. She earned her bachelor’s degree in physics at Montana State University and doctorate in astronomy in 1999 at the University of Michigan. She performed postdoctoral work at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Massachusetts.

In 2004, she joined the Center for Gravitational Wave Physics at Pennsylvania State University, where she became a big fan of gravitational waves and attended many talks on loop quantum gravity. Her main interests are in computational galaxy dynamics, various black holes and gravitational waves.

Holley-Bockelmann is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, she is a Vanderbilt Chancellor Faculty Fellow and NASA has supported her work. Her research on growing supermassive black holes and rogue black holes has been featured in many online and print media outlets.

EYH at MTSU will be held during the week of the 30^th anniversary of National Chemistry Week, which has a 2017 theme of “Chemistry Rocks.”

For more information about EYH at MTSU, visit http://www.mtsu.edu/eyh/, email eyh@mtsu.edu or call 615-904-8253.