Madison Delaney
Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center
About
Madison Delaney is a physics and engineering teacher at Von Steuben Metropolitan Science center. She is so excited to be participating in the BEST program at UIC having just finished her first year as a teacher during the 2022-2023 academic year. Madison Delaney is passionate about helping students work on authentic scientific inquiry projects that allow students to be exposed not only with science content knowledge, but also with a social and political context to what they are learning. She hopes that by doing this sort of learning students can develop their own personal agency and worldview about science and engineering, and encourage students who may be discouraged in learning science and engineering to become more confident, engaged, and critical thinkers around the subjects.
Madison Delaney worked with the Eddington Lab, a microfluidics lab in the college of engineering. In this program she worked with another student to build a low-cost portable photospectrometry that could be used in both educational and field work contexts. This work was influential in helping Madison see the wider application of photospectrometry, as well as lab investigation and innovation generally, to public health research.
In her curriculum, students will examine the ways that light waves interact with one another to create the visible light spectrum, use this knowledge to examine air pollution levels in Chicago, and propose implement that could be used to measure air pollution levels through light transmission.