Sharing a love of science with Centre County elementary students
“The best STEM class ever.” That’s what Emma Steinebronn hears from students when she visits local elementary schools with the PAW Pals program. Steinebronn is a physics doctoral candidate with a love for science, a passion for outreach work, and a desire to make the world a better place. When she’s not doing research in condensed matter physics, where she works with electronic materials, Steinebronn runs PAW Pals, which she created in 2022.
PAW Pals organizes monthly undergraduate and graduate student visits to STEM classes at Park Forest Elementary School and Ferguson Township Elementary School in Centre County, Pennsylvania. Steinebronn started this program through Physics and Astronomy for Women Plus, a student-run organization at Penn State, for which she previously served as outreach chair and is now the president. It has grown since its beginning in 2022: PAW Pals now has four administrators and 95 volunteers between the two elementary schools.
“When I came to Penn State, I knew that I wanted to do something outside of research, and I wanted to do a lot of outreach because that type of thing means a lot to me,” Steinebronn said. “When I was an undergrad student, I got to experience a program like PAW Pals on a smaller scale. We would work with the elementary schools and do science experiments with them periodically. And that’s something that I wanted to create here at Penn State.”
According to Steinebronn, she has seen the direct impact that PAW Pals has had on many students over the years.
“The kids get really excited, and their faces light up when they see the PAW Pals in the classroom,” she said. “One of the teachers told me that she had a young Black girl come up to her and say, ‘I didn’t know people like me could do this.’ Why we do this is to get them experience with scientific equipment that they might not normally see and expose them to scientists of all backgrounds to show them that anybody can do science.”
For her efforts to share her love of physics, as well as her determination and dedication to helping others, Steinebronn was one of two students who were awarded the inaugural Be More Lovisa Graduate Student Scholarship in Physics. The scholarship was created to honor the life of Lovisa Arnesson-Cronhamre, a graduate student in architectural engineering whose life was cut short last year before she could pursue her passion of physics.
“I didn’t know Lovisa, but after speaking with her family and reading her fiancé’s words about her, she seemed like the person that I strive to be every day,” Steinebronn said. “She had this beautiful love of life and of science and a strong passion for both of those. Those are things that I try to balance every day because I love science, but I also spend a lot of my time outside of the lab trying to work to make the community a better place. I think that I’m really honored to have been given this scholarship because all of Lovisa’s values are those that I strive to achieve every day, so it really meant a lot.”
Steinebronn hopes to become a teaching professor after she graduates from Penn State, so she can focus on sharing science with others.