ASSIP

George Mason’s summer camps introduce K-12 students to STEM fields and life on a college campus

Shayla Brown — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 19:49:58 +0000

George Mason’s summer camps introduce K-12 students to STEM fields and life on a college campus  Shayla Brown Mon, 08/04/2025 - 15:49

George Mason Ģ��AV’s science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) summer camps, programs, and workshops are dedicated to inspiring the next generation of scientists and researchers with STEM-focused curriculum and hands-on learning experiences. 

 The camps, offered to K-12 students, are run by George Mason faculty, staff, and students from the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) and the College of Science (COS).  

In addition to hands-on experience and mentorship, attendees experience life on a college campus, preparing them to enter the higher education environment. 

 Aspiring Scientists 

The College of Science’s Aspiring Scientist Summer Internship Program (ASSIP) is one of the longest running summer STEM programs at George Mason. Nearly 400 students are participating in ASSIP this year both in person and remotely.

“ASSIP is an amazing eight-week program designed to give students more experience in the advanced labs. It runs every summer with different mentors from all over George Mason,” said Isela Gallagher, PhD Biosciences ’19, senior research scientist, Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine (CAPMM) affiliate.  

Isela Gallagher (right) working with ASSIP students. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of Ģ��AV Branding.

Gallagher is an ASSIP faculty mentor working with local high school students Alex Simmonds and Yelyzaveta "Liza" Kalchenko.  

The rising seniors attended the Governor’s School at Innovation Park, which allows high school juniors and seniors to spend part of each school day experiencing life as George Mason students, where they heard about this opportunity to work alongside faculty mentors on a research topic of their choosing. 

“We're learning different lab techniques and working with laser capture microdissection, or LCM, and reverse phase protein arrays, or RPBA. We're doing this work to isolate cancer cells from breast tissue samples to better research them,” explained Simmonds, who attends Forest Park High School in Woodbridge, Virginia. 

Simmonds and Kalchenko are working out of the Advanced Biomedical Research Building at the Science and Technology Campus (SciTech Campus). The students will share their findings at the end of summer presentation for the program on August 7.  

FOCUS  

The FOCUS camp is a five-day residential camp geared toward helping middle and high school students better understand career options. It also utilizes alumni and community partners. 

FOCUS was started in 2014 with four cofounders, including mathematics professor Padmanabhan Seshaiyer, forensic science professor Kelly Knight, former biology professor Claudette Davis, and George Mason alumna Danielle Craddock, MA Integrative Studies ’11, founder of Girls Inspired and Ready to Lead Inc.  

This summer, FOCUS took place from July 14-18 with Craddock serving as the FOCUS program manager, while Knight serves as director of the program.  

FOCUS provides positive role models and experiences with STEM that will increase students’ confidence level in their knowledge, skills, and competencies in the respective fields. 

Each weekday of the camp focused on a different letter of STEM: Monday is science, Tuesday is tech, Wednesday is engineering, and Thursday is math, and on Friday, STEM professionals speak to the students through an interactive panel as well as do a poster presentation. 

ASSIP students working in the lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of Ģ��AV Branding.

“The students do all types of workshops from coding robotic arms to crime scene investigation, to building rollercoasters,” Knight said. “They also engage in team sessions where we focus on team and community building as well as reviewing content covered that day or content to be covered the next day.”  

“The high school students have an additional workshop before that focuses on college prep, confidence building, or specialized skills such as entrepreneurship,” she added. 

The camp builds students’ relationships with George Mason by prioritizing returning students in the registration process and as a result, the high school program is almost always sold out by alumni of the program within minutes, explained Kelly. The middle school program also has a significant number of alumni and also sells out within minutes.  

In addition to staying in the residence halls to get taste of campus life, camp participants learn more about the college experience from George Mason Admissions representatives and tour the campus. 

“This year we are also doing a workshop on college scholarships and introducing students to skills they will need to be successful in higher education,” said Knight. 

Space Exploration 

Camps such as the NASA-funded program Mason Space Exploration Center (MSEC) are spread across George Mason campuses and provide students with access to some of the university’s most notable facilities such as the Observatory. During its three years, the camp has expanded its offerings to meet demand.  

MSEC students. Photo provided.

“MSEC started as a summer camp but has now also expanded into many different outreach activities and family events, such as Space Day, that cater to fourth through ninth grade students,” said Rob Parks, COS assistant director of MSEC. 

 “We're hoping to be able to stay involved with these families as these kids age, so that hopefully we can encourage them to consider George Mason [when thinking about colleges],” said Parks. 

Rising high school seniors Gwen Chaves and Gabby Whitefield and Rob Parks are Observatory tour guides. Chavs led the advanced camp on the Science and Technology Campus. Whitefield was the lead flight director, facilitating daily Astronomy and STEM-related lectures, activities, crafts, and demonstrations. 

“A lot of the kids in the advanced camp are asking me about my experience in George Mason STEM and what it's like to live on campus,” said Chaves. “They’re really curious about what kind of labs and facilities we have, which are cool questions to be able to answer. It’s exciting to teach them about what George Mason has to offer them later on in their academic careers.” 

Engineering Is a Growing Field

Camps on engineering and related topics are always popular at George Mason, and there are a variety of programs on all three of the university’s Northern Virginia campuses for students looking to be inspired. 

The CEC Office of Outreach, Student Success, and Engagement (OSSE) offers outreach activities that encourage creativity and nurture a passion for STEM from an early age. Outreach activities include the Fall STEAM Fest, the Spring into STEM Event, the STEM Summer Showcase, and the Engineering 4 Us All Program. 

George Mason’s Exploring Renewable Energy Engineering Summer Camp, held at Mason Square is sponsored by Amazon Web Services. This camp, led by CEC professor Liling Huang, offered high school students a range of interactive science and engineering activities, including building a model town powered entirely by clean renewable energy.  

Huang’s E2 Center for Energy Exploration will host an upcoming summer camp for high school students as well. 

MSEC students. Photo provided.

BioE-Buzz 

Carolyn Wilson, internship coordinator for the Bioengineering Department, worked with the department’s external advisory board, called the Alliance, to increase the pipeline of students coming into the department.  

Through this initiative, Wilson created BioE-Buzz, a CEC summer camp for rising high school juniors and seniors.  

“We have a number of campers who are interested in majoring in bioengineering based on what they learned and were exposed to during the camp, so that really encouraged us to expand our sessions this year from one to two weeks. We’ve also doubled the number of campers from our first year,” said Wilson. 

The camp takes place on the Fairfax and SciTech campuses. The camp’s counselors, coordinators, and volunteers are George Mason students. 

“This is our second year of BioE-Buzz, and we have the campus structured so that students spend their time getting to know what Mason has to offer. They have access to our Nanofabrication and EDGE facilities as well as the MIX,” said BioE Buzz camp director Khadija Zaidi-Rashid, PhD Bioengineering ’23. 

Students will give presentations on what they learned and experienced at George Mason’s summer camps with a STEM End of Summer Showcase in August. 

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Summer Camps

ASSIP

College of Engineering and Computing

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Governor's School at Innovation Park

Campus News

Mason Engineering professor inspires and mentors women in STEM

Martha Bushong — Mon, 30 Aug 2021 18:12:11 +0000

Mason Engineering professor inspires and mentors women in STEM Martha Bushong Mon, 08/30/2021 - 14:12

In This Story

Nathalia Peixoto

Nathalia Peixoto (on left) works with graduate students in the Neural Engineering Lab. Photo by Evan Cantwell

When Nathalia Peixoto was growing up in Brazil, she told people she wanted to be a teacher and an engineer when she grew up.

“My brother and sister made fun of me, saying that those don’t go together,” says Peixoto, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and an affiliate faculty member with the Department of Bioengineering. “My mom never finished her first year of college, so it was not clear that anyone in our family would go to college.”

But Peixoto was determined. She went to a vocational-technical school instead of a traditional high school and became a technician in electronics and robotics, working with five engineers. “When I disagreed with them, or they asked me to do things that I thought were wrong, they said, ‘Unless you have a bachelor’s degree, you can’t call any shots.’”

So Peixoto went on to get an undergraduate degree, PhD, then conduct research at the Ģ��AV of Bonn in Germany as well as Stanford Ģ��AV before coming to Mason in 2004 as a post-doc in the physics department. She joined the Volgenau School of Engineering in 2006 as an assistant professor in ECE.

Now Peixoto is living her childhood dream, combining her love for teaching and engineering while mentoring young women, like herself, who had to overcome obstacles to become engineers. “I prefer to help people who have difficulties navigating the academic world,” says Peixoto, who won Mason’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2015.

As a supervisor for the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), she meets with minority students, sharing stories of her journey, providing guidance on job searches and applying to graduate school, and tips on finding a lab to conduct research while an undergraduate.

She has worked with students she met in classes, in the hallway, through other professors, during her presentations to middle and high school students, and at Mason’s Aspiring Scientist Summer Internship Program.

Peixoto estimates she has mentored hundreds of students over the years, often supervising their research projects. Currently, she is overseeing nine independent research projects led by high school and undergraduate students, three ECE senior design team projects, as well as three research projects in her Neural Engineering Lab, which is affiliated with both the ECE and Bioengineering departments and is part of the Institute for Biohealth Innovation. 

Her high school, undergraduate, and graduate students perform team-based projects on assistive technology, wearable embedded systems, and neural implants.

“One of the things I’ve learned is that our best students bloom if you give them freedom,” Peixoto says.

For one of her funded research projects, a graduate student is creating a device that uses wireless signals to detect people’s heart rate and breath behind walls of rubble. “It could be used to detect a person who was buried because of an earthquake or in a war zone,” she says.

The U.S. Air Force is funding the project. “There’s a lot of math behind it and hardware/software development to be done to make it work, but I am hopeful it will be really useful.”

For another project, she’s working with an epidemiologist to develop a portable robot that can collect ticks, which will help for research on tick-borne diseases.

In another, she’s working with a Social Work professor at Mason on virtual-reality tools to help people who are recovering from addiction. Her expertise here is on analyzing brain signals and the physiological state of the user during exposure to triggers.

She is also a co-investigator on a prestigious Research Traineeship grant of nearly $3 million from the National Science Foundation to cross-train graduate students over the next five years.

Peixoto appreciates the flexibility she has at Mason to wear many hats. “I have the perfect balance of how much I can interact with students, how much I can mentor them, and I can allow them to do whatever research they want.

“After students leave Mason, they often keep in touch and let me know how their professional and personal lives are going,” she says. “Their stories become part of mine, they always have their experiences at Mason impact them, and it is gratifying for me to see and be part of that.”