Dozens of California high school students recently finished four weeks on the UC Merced campus, where they delved into topics including nanoparticles, digital twins, bioluminescent squids, and quantum physics.

The students took part in COSMOS, or California State Summer School for Mathematics & Science, which expanded to UC Merced for the first time this year. Other COSMOS sites are UCs Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Diego and Santa Cruz.  Michele Nishiguchi and Bobbi Henderson are the director and assistant director for UC Merced COSMOS, which sponsored 161 high school students this summer.

Participants, divided into focused academic groups of 22 to 24 students called clusters, lived on campus, taking part in projects led by UC faculty members and supported by industry partners, postdoctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate mentors. For the inaugural year, UC Merced offered seven clusters.

At the conclusion of the program, students presented their results at a research symposium attended by hundreds of people at the university's conference center.

Amey Amle of Menlo Park showed off his team's project, a robotic arm. "Our project is a really cool claw machine," he said. "We use the claw machine to pick up diamonds."

One of Amle's partners, Tafei Dhout of San Jose, said she enjoyed the program and all the chhallenges it brought, as the team tried different iterations of the project to make it work.

"It's like solving a puzzle," she said.

Sophie Han and Hayley Szeto demonstrated their project, "LEGO Microfluidics: Evaluating their Performance through Hydraulic Resistance."

Han said she heard about COSMOS through classmates at Harker High School in San Jose. Her project was aimed at determining the relationship between the slope of a syringe and the flow rate of fluid through it. Han and Szeto used Legos because they are easy to replicate with a 3-D printer.

It wasn't all work for the participants, however. Though they spent weekdays focused on their projects, they also went on various field trips and even took in a Fresno Grizzlies baseball game.

One of the clusters visited Castle Air Force Aviation and Development Center. While their work was focused on the future of flight, they saw some of its history on a tour of the air museum.

Prisha Paliwal, 17, of San Jose was drawn by the at UC Merced's COSMOS program this summer.

"It's different from what I've done before," she said of her work with digital twins, which are virtual representations of physical objects.

She said she was impressed with UC Merced. "It's a beautiful campus," she said. "It gets hot, but in the evenings it cools off."

The cluster also got to visit the university's MESA (Mechatronics, Embedded Systems and Automation) lab, where they examined a number of drone projects completed by students and researchers.

And they heard from Cal Fire, which is working with some of that same technology at its newly established training facility at Castle.

"We introduced drones in firefighting," said Jason Tompkins, forestry logistics officer for Cal Fire. "Prior to that we would walk the perimeter of a fire with a GPS to measure it."

Cal Fire also uses AI-equipped cameras to perform the job previously held by lookouts- watching for fires in mountainous areas of the state. The AI can differentiate between a smoke plume and a cloud of dust from a farmer discing a field.

Tompkins said the organization has worked with researchers at UC Merced on drones, wildfire modeling and other technology.

"We are hoping to build that relationship even further," he said.

He went on to answer questions about the students regarding job opportunities and requirements.

That interaction is one way COSMOS is more than a STEM-focused summer camp. Students get the opportunity to work with faculty, researchers and scientists in state-of-the-art facilities while exploring college and career paths.

Han said she found the program challenging and rewarding.

"I've always been interested in physics in general," she said. Exploring a research topic on a college campus with experts in the field was exciting. "And it was really fun."

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