MechSE staff member wins NSTA education award

MechSE's Joseph Muskin, educational coordinator at the Nano-CEMMS Center, was recently awarded the NSTA's Distinguished Informal Science Educator Award for extraordinary contributions to the advancement of science education in a nontraditional setting.

NSTA, the National Science Teachers Association, is an organization of over 60,000 science teachers, science supervisors, administrators, scientists, and business and industry representatives committed to science education. They only give out 17 awards each year. For the Distinguished Informal Science Educator Award, the applicants were judged according to active leadership, noteworthy scholarly contributions, and unique or extraordinary accomplishments in informal science education.

Nano-CEMMS, of which Muskin has been a staff member for nine years, is the Center for Nanoscale Chemical-Electrical-Mechanical Manufacturing Systems, a nanotechnology center funded by the NSF. Their educational outreach is extensive and includes university courses, summer camps, a traveling exhibit about flexible silicon, and participation in several museum programs. Muskin is instrumental in the logistics of these efforts, as well as one of the lead demonstrators in presentations, but feels there is a lot of credit to go around.

"It always feels great when one is recognized for their hard work, but this truly was a shared award with all the wonderful faculty, fellow co-workers, and students who have contributed so much to the education program here," Muskin said.

Muskin was nom

inated by Tara Bell, a STEM Specialist at Booker T. Washington STEM Academy in Champaign, Illinois. The school is one of many in the area that Muskin has visited on behalf of Nano-CEMMS, giving demonstrations with 3-dimensional printers, polymers, scanning electron microscopes, and more. In addition to giving demonstrations to students, he also gives workshops and seminars for teachers so that they may be able to do nanoscience-related experiments on their own.

"I remember when we first started all those years ago, we were excited to be invited to one school and we had only four teachers attend our first workshop," Muskin said. "Now we are out in a school several times a week and our teacher workshops fill every summer, with over several hundred having attended over the last few years. What a long way we have come."

Muskin has presented in hundreds of afterschool and weekend science programs for students of all ages, well over

20,000 participants. He has presented over 70 times at education and science conferences and has authored or coauthored seven publications about science education. He is also a board member and an education committee member at the Orpheum Children's Science Museum in Champaign and recently trained and supplied their staff to conduct "science nights" at 10 local elementary schools. 

The Distinguished Informal Science Educator Award consists of a paid trip to attend the NSTA National Conference on Science Education, held in San Antonio, Texas in April 2013. He will be honored at the Awards Banquet held during the conference.