2007 was the second year of SPHERE. Our mentors were Dr. Lin Chambers, Dr. Margaret Pippin and Dr. Eduardo Socolovsky and Dr. S. Raj Chaudhury. Project teams were Clouds team, Ozone team, Knowledge Discovery team and SciViz/Sunphotometer team.
2006 was the first year of SPHERE. The program is based on a prior project called REESS (Research Experience in Earth System Science) which ran at Norfolk State University from 1998-2003. Dr. Waldo Rodriguez (now with NASA LaRC) and Dr. S. Raj Chaudhury (now at CNU) were the Principal Investigators of that project. It received funding from NASA Earth Science Enterprise and NASA Minority University Research and Education Division (both these entities have since undergone reorganization and are called something different now!).
As a partnership between CNU, NSU and NASA, the students for SPHERE 2006 represented those universities. There were 3 students from NSU, 2 from CNU, 1 from UVA, 1 from ECSU, 1 from University of Houston and 1 from Texas Southern University. In addition to their SPHERE work, these students participated in a week-long GLOBE training program with local educators. Project evaluation was conducted by Ms. Sara Chappell, MAT who created online surveys for SPHERE students and GLOBE educators in addition to attending several weekly presentation settings as well as parts of the GLOBE workshop.