University Enterprises, Incorporated

NSF Awards · FY 2026 · 2026-10

Many high school students do not have the chance to take computer science classes. This project aims to help more students gain access to computer science by training teachers in new ways to teach important topics like problem-solving, computer basics, and how computers can be used responsibly. The project is expected to increase student interest in computer science, stay in computer science classes, and even choose careers in technology. It will work with one of California's largest school districts (Elk Grove Unified School District) and has the potential to improve education and job opportunities for thousands of students. The results could also provide insights to other schools across the country to better support student learning about computers and technology. This project builds on previous work to expand access to computer science in high schools by using a researcher-practitioner partnership to study the effects of teacher professional development on student motivation and retention in computational courses. The research will use design-based methods to investigate how training teachers in design thinking, core computer science concepts, and key artificial intelligence topics affects student motivation, engagement, and enrollment in information and communication technology pathways. The project will involve collaboration between university faculty and public school educators in order to increase the number of participating schools, teachers, and students. By generating new evidence on how teacher training impacts student outcomes, this work will contribute to the field of computer science education and inform future practices aimed at student recruitment and retention in computational subjects. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2026 · 2026-01

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Enriching Learning, Programs, and Student Experiences, Level 1 project aims to initiate and test Peer Assisted Learning, a successful modified Peer-Led Team Learning concurrent model, in two new settings to enhance the quality of STEM education, decrease fail rates and improve grades, retention, and feelings of belonging. The first setting is in Calculus 1 and 2 courses at a California community college where the recent state Assembly Bill 1705 is altering prerequisite requirements for this course sequence. As California two-year institutions explore new forms of concurrent student support in this changing landscape, this project will help determine whether Peer Assisted Learning is an effective intervention to support this policy reform. The second setting is in a statistics course at a four-year university with high transfer-enrollment, where implementing Peer Assisted Learning seeks to increase success of students immediately post-transfer. Overall, this project aims to improve grades and retention in two settings where students tend to abandon STEM degrees. Moreover, it will provide knowledge on the effectiveness of the proven Peer Assisted Learning model in high-fail courses. This project aims to test Peer Assisted Learning in three key mathematics and statistics courses to reduce fail rates and improve grades, retention and feelings of belonging. It will create and administer new concurrent courses, faculty and student professional development, and added transfer student resources. Student performance and retention will be analyzed using statistical methods and surveys will be administered to examine belongingness. Data on students who participate in a concurrent Peer Assisted Learning course will be compared with those who do not, and subsets of post-transfer students and students influenced by Assembly Bill 1705 will be studied. Knowledge generated from this project will be disseminated to the broader research community, as well as to other community colleges and public, four-year universities impacted by this or similar legislation. This project will support ~300 calculus students and ~180 transfer students to enhance key points of the transfer STEM pathway. Faculty professional development will train seven faculty at each campus (14 total). Student facilitators will be trained to lead 32 courses over three years. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and increase capacity to engage in the development and implementation of innovations to improve STEM teaching and learning at HSIs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2025 · 2025-09

Mergers of ultra-compact stellar remnants called neutron stars have now been observed. They provide new tools to study general relativity, compact objects, neutron star equation of state, plasma physics, astrophysical jet physics, and nucleosynthesis. A joint US-Israeli research team will develop numerical simulations of binary mergers through their full development. The US effort is jointly led by California State University, Sacramento, Purdue University, and Northwestern University. The team will aim to construct “meter-to-parsec” models of binary mergers, which follow through the entire journey of length and time scale, by directly connecting the pre-merger state of a neutron star - neutron star (NS-NS) or neutron star - black hole (NS-BH) binary to the regions where the observed photons are produced. This project has two main broader societal impacts : (i) Development of a globally competitive STEM workforce; and (ii) Improvement of STEM education of K-12 students. The models will allow interpretation of various observables of the system by connecting them with the conditions inside the ejecta and in the pre-merger phase: (i) Generating consistent models of the jet profile will allow the researchers to connect the observed off-axis emission to the conditions at the base of the jet and help construct reliable emission models for the multi-wavelength counterparts of gravitational wave events. (ii) To date, it is still not known if the compact merger remnants powering short gamma-ray bursts (sGRB) jets are BHs or NSs. By mapping the main differences between the physical properties and emission profiles of jets powered by these two types of engines, the research will provide a method to distinguish between them, independent of the kilonova emission, which may not be detectable in typical multi-messenger events. (iii) The question of energy composition in the jet at large scales is a long standing puzzle in sGRBs. The answer can shed light on the acceleration mechanisms and emission processes responsible for the prompt gamma-rays. In addition, the Sacramento State principal investigator (PI) will partner with the Sacramento State planetarium to develop a new curriculum for K-5 audiences that visit the planetarium as part of their free school field trips. The Purdue PI will partner with the Saturday Morning Astrophysics Purdue program for middle and high-school students to develop and lead an annual session on the detection of gravitational waves and the study of compact objects in the Universe. The Northwestern PI will partner with the REACH high school program to mentor Chicago-area high school students each summer. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-10

Galaxies come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, and each has a subtly different rate at which it forms stars and depletes its gas supply. Spiral galaxies, like our own Milky Way, act as great star formation engines of the Universe. Over their several billion-year histories they convert their gas reservoirs into stellar material. These stars then deliver energy and material back into the interstellar medium (ISM). The principal investigator will use computer simulations to gauge the role of the shape and dynamics of a given galaxy in determining how well it forms stars. By comparing six model galaxies, spanning a range of morphologies, connections can be made between structure and rate of star formation and inform interpretations of data from modern observational facilities. The project will employ two undergraduate researchers who will be tasked with constraining initial conditions of the simulations, testing new physics routines in the simulation code, and comparing results of simulations to observable data products. The PI will also develop a new undergraduate astrophysical research methods course to foster greater interest in astronomy and prepare students for higher level degrees in the field. The team will conduct hydrodynamical+gravitational numerical simulations of nearby systems to assess to what degree a galaxy’s structure and dynamics are a controlling factor in regulating its star forming activity. A complete picture of the star formation process is vital throughout astronomy, tying directly into the numbers of stars formed in a given location in a galaxy, their resulting elemental abundances, and conditions surrounding them. Currently, there is a lack of a suite of galactic simulations tailored to specific nearby galaxies in the field. This work will be the first of its kind and will formulate a tailored set of models that would act as a 1:1 comparison tool to test models of gaseous and stellar physics and their role in cloud creation and star formation. This will allow a detailed study of the impact of spiral arms and galactic bars inherent to these systems on the star formation process and in sculpting their dense gas. The project will use an array of metrics to test the model results against real observations, including resolved star formation relations, scale-heights of gas/stars, and structure/kinematics of gaseous disks. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

This project, submitted by California State University-Sacramento, proposes Project SOAR (investigating Students Online self-efficacy, Academic performance, and course Redesign). The aim is to study how student academic performance may influence redesign of online STEM courses (electrical engineering, computer science) to improve student self-efficacy, with the goal of improving student retention and decreasing the dropout rate. This research pilot study will be paired with professional development for the PI to develop science education research expertise in both quantitative and qualitative study design, mixed methods research and data analysis techniques. The project professional development plan will support the development of the capacity of the PI to carry out high-quality STEM education research and improve the nation's STEM education. The professional development is accompanied by a research pilot project that addresses research on the effect of redesigning online STEM courses. This activity is based on Bandura's Social Cognitive theory, which has been used to predict student performance in online engineering courses. The project addresses four undergraduate courses in engineering with high course fail rates and wide equity gaps. The plan is to be implemented using a two-phase mixed methods research design to enhance students' self-efficacy with a goal of improving student performance. The project also aims to increase the effectiveness of instructor-led course redesign, particularly with 'enhancement of student self-efficacy' as a goal. The project is supported by NSF's EDU Core Research: Building Capacity for STEM Education Research (BCSER) program, which is designed to build investigators' capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF Awards · FY 2024 · 2024-09

ATLAS is a multi-purpose particle physics detector situated around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, just outside of Geneva, Switzerland. The goal of the ATLAS Collaboration’s physics program is to explore the fundamental nature of the universe at the smallest distance scales and highest energies achieved in a controlled environment. In July of 2022, the LHC restarted operations at a record center of mass energy of 13.6 TeV for proton-proton collisions, marking the beginning of Run 3 where more than 200 fb−1 of data is expected to be collected. This award will explore this new energy regime and the large dataset will allow for precision testing of the Standard Model of particle physics (SM), measurement of the properties of the Higgs Boson and its couplings, and the search for undiscovered particles and phenomena such as heavy bosons, gravitons, dark matter, and leptoquarks. At the end of 2025, the LHC will enter the next long shutdown where it will be upgraded to the High-Luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) that will provide record numbers of proton-proton collisions at a design center of mass energy of 14 TeV. During this shutdown, the work of this award will contribute to the replacement of the entire inner tracking detector with the Inner Tracker Upgrade (ITk) so that ATLAS is able to provide precision track information for the more than 200 simultaneous collisions expected every 25ns. This award supports the research of the California State University (CSU) ATLAS group, including PIs at CSU Sacramento and CSU East Bay along with a diverse student population of undergraduate researchers in the CSU system. The group will collect and analyze data during Run 3 and study the Higgs boson by examining events which produce pairs of Higgs bosons (HH). This process can be used as a precision test of the SM, in particular probing the nature of electroweak symmetry breaking. Additionally Higgs pair production can be used to search for new scalar particles, predicted in a number of Beyond the Standard Model theories. In preparation for the HL-LHC, the CSU ATLAS group will work as members of the ATLAS ITk group to design, build, and install components of the Inner Pixel tracker that will be integrated into ATLAS in 2028. The focus of the ITk work will be on the production and integration of the ITk Inner Pixel modules and the Detector Control System (DCS) which includes the development of software and user interfaces. Undergraduates will be involved in all aspects of the proposed CSU ATLAS research program and will participate in collaborative science, data analysis, and in instrumentation testing at the campus laboratories as well as at SLAC and CERN. Supporting CSU students on their paths to physics graduate school and careers in science will have a significant impact on diversifying the physics workforce of the future. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.