Physics Outreach

The Flipped Science Fair (FSF) flips the traditional science fair format on its head: middle school student judges evaluate graduate students and postdocs presenting their current research. Middle school students learn about cutting-edge research from real Yale scientists in a small-group setting, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and participate in hands-on demonstrations. The presenters learn to tailor their research pitch to a general audience, with emphasis on keeping things exciting, understandable, and relevant. Our partnership with Pathways to Science, Yale’s coordinated STEM outreach infrastructure, enables long term tracking of student outcomes to measure the FSF’s effectiveness. Flipped Science Fair was inspired by the Kid’s Judge Neuroscience Fair at UPenn.

We develop and incubate open source and disruptive projects that seek to address the most pressing big picture challenges. To navigate such an ambitious mission, we combine interdisciplinary frameworks on holistic thinking to understand complex problems, propose and build solutions designed to catalyze transformational change. We leverage emerging technologies in systems that can harness the power of human collaboration.

Our mission is to provide a decentralized space to research and produce open source projects that represent innovative approaches to complex global challenges. We constantly challenge our processes on how to scale collaboration and use collective intelligence to pursue bold, paradigm-shifting projects.

With an overarching goal to encourage and support promising young scholars to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math, Yale Pathways to Science opens the door for middle and high school students to explore STEM at Yale University. The more than 1,800 Pathways to Science Scholars are considered the youngest members of Yale’s scientific community and are invited to Yale’s campus throughout the year for special events, academic lectures, demonstrations, laboratory visits, and research opportunities. Once accepted into the program, students are invited to attend more than 150 different programs and events annually, choosing to participate in the opportunities that interest them most. In the past, students have viewed the cosmos at Yale’s state-of-the-art planetarium, launched rockets, built telescopes, examined brain specimens with Yale neuroscientists, and much more.

We as an organization aim to ignite scientific engagement across diverse communities and train effective science communicators. To this end, we speak about science at venues ranging from libraries to local bars across New Haven and beyond. As Yale graduate and professional students and postdoctoral scholars, we have a responsibility to make science accessible to the general public, especially to under-served communities. We believe that anyone can engage with science and use it in their lives.