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UNM Engineering wins award for booth at Discovery Festival

December 4, 2019 - By Kim Delker

The University of New Mexico School of Engineering booth won runner-up for best single booth at the Big Brothers Big Sisters Discovery Festival on Nov. 22 at the Albuquerque Convention Center.

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The event, designed to interest and attract students into the STEM disciplines, drew thousands of elementary, middle school and high school students.

The UNM Engineering booth included students, faculty and staff from a variety of programs and projects, including biomedical engineering, chemical and biological engineering, computer engineering, and the CISTAR and NASCENT engineering research centers. The Center for Water and Environment, based in the School of Engineering, also had a separate booth.

Among the highlights were Shuya Wei, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, who demonstrated “lemon batteries” that powered an LED, and graduate student Tracy Mallette, who directed students to do a bit of Logo programming that generated artistic stickers. Students also made take-home LED circuits and pipe-cleaner molecules, explored the behavior of gases, as well as nanomaterials such as butterfly’s wings and chemistry, such as bugs used to make inks.