FACULTY AWARD: Carey, Gunn receive NSF award to bring STEM to prisons

By Staff on Sept. 14, 2016, 1:30 p.m.

Two Princeton University faculty members have received a two-year National Science Foundation INCLUDES award to create a statewide educational pilot program called "STEPs to STEM" that would bring science education into New Jersey state prisons. Jannette Carey, an associate professor of chemistry, and James Gunn, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Astronomy, Emeritus, proposed to create a statewide STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) track within community-college programs established in state prisons through the New Jersey Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons Consortium (NJ-STEP). The grant builds on long-standing collaborations between education, government and volunteer organizations such as the Prison Teaching Initiative based in Princeton's Program in Teacher Preperation. The program was one of 37 Design and Development Launch Pilots to receive the first-ever awards from the NSF INCLUDES program, which aims to improve access to STEM education among underserved populations.

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