Engineering staff member recipient of Excellence in STEM Award

Stefi Weisburd, education and outreach manager in the School of Engineering, was recently selected as a 2020 New Mexico Excellence in STEM Award winner.

The annual awards, known as the “STEMYS,” are given by the Air Force Research Lab Tech Engagement Office. The awards honor students, teachers, volunteers and other New Mexicans doing great things in science, technology, engineering and math education.

“This year’s STEMY winners are an impressive group of individuals and organizations who are doing amazing work to expand STEM capacity in New Mexico,” said Matt Fetrow, director of the AFRL Tech Engagement Office. “The STEMYS give us an opportunity to highlight that important work and to celebrate it as a state.”

Weisburd’s background includes physics, science journalism and poetry for children and adults, and she uses her diverse computer engineer salary to develop unique hands-on outreach activities, which often incorporate nature and current events. She works closely with the Engineering Student Success Center to organize about 40 outreach events a year, which involve more than 6,000 K-12 students and UNM student volunteers. She also selects and helps place high school students in mentored research lab internships, arranges poster sessions for these students and works on the UNM team of the Purdue University-based Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR), a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center.