About 80 students aged 14 to 20 visited the research building ZEMOS on Wednesday to get to know the cutting-edge research in the Cluster of Excellence RESOLV. The students are participants of the “Jugend forscht” NRW state competition. As winners of the respective regional competitions, they came to Bochum to present their projects at the state level. During a festive ceremony the best contributions in their respective fields were awarded and thus qualified for the national final in Bremen.
In order to give these future scientists a glimpse of what life as a scientist is like, RESOLV has invited them to ZEMOS. After a short introductory talk by RESOLV spokeswoman Martina Havenith, the students were guided through the building in small groups. They could visit the different laboratories and try out for themselves how it feels to work as a researcher. Since research at RESOLV is very interdisciplinary, the participants were able to see a wide range of different laboratories. From electro-chemistry and biology labs, to spectroscopy and transmission electron microscope labs, students were also able to tour the computational clusters of the theory groups. Another highlight was to see how a modern research building is operated by visiting the helium recovery system.
As the science partner of this year's "Jugend forscht" NRW state competition, RESOLV announced a special prize for projects with RESOLV-related research questions. Speaker Prof. Dr. Martina Havenith and Dr. Klaus Engel, member of the Advisory Board of RESOLV awarded Merle Baumgarten, Theresa Horlitz and Tim Culemann for their outstanding achievements in the field of Solvation Science for their project "Ein-Kristall - selfmade!" (Theodor-Fliedner-Gymnasium, Düsseldorf) special prize.
