Student Partnerships for Advanced Research and Knowledge (SPARK)

The Student Partnerships for Advanced Research and Knowledge (SPARK) program provides an opportunity for all high school students and their science educators to become visiting researchers to Brookhaven National Laboratory’s scientific facilities— just like the thousands of scientific researchers use them for their research each year.

Participants in this year-round program will conduct hypothesis-driven research through collaborations with scientific experts at Brookhaven Lab. This experience enables students to actively contribute to the scientific community, obtain a real research experience, and motivate students to consider careers in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. Educators will have the opportunity to enrich their curriculum content, develop long-term research partnerships with Lab scientists and may be eligible to receive continuing education credit.

Program Overview

The SPARK program starts with a weeklong introduction for educators and their students where they will gain an understanding of:

• Scientific capabilities of the facilities
• Scientific data analysis
• Proposal writing

Should the participants decide they want to perform research at one of Brookhaven Lab’s facilities as part of this program, the educators and their students must submit a proposal outlining the research experiment they would like to conduct in order to be considered for access to one of the Lab’s facilities.

As a user of the Brookhaven Lab facilities, participants will be asked to share their findings in the Center for Functional Nanomaterials/ National Synchrotron Light Source II annual user meeting and scientific and educational journals.  

Participating User Facilities

• The National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II)
• The Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN)

The Student Partnerships for Advanced Research and Knowledge (SPARK) program provides high school students and their science educators the opportunity to become visiting researchers to Brookhaven National Laboratory’s scientific facilities— just like the thousands of scientific researchers use them for their research each year.