2010 Joseph Priestley Science Fair Awards

UUFSM is a religion of both reverence and reason.  In support of that, we award the Joseph Priestley Award to the students whose science fair project has the best potential to improve quality of life or shows great promise. In 2010, UUFSM awarded prizes to Emali Kitchen and Jonathan Munshaw from Chopticon HS for their project "Esters and the Human Nose" and to Matthew Johnson for his project "Oil Viscosity: Does it Matter?".

Joseph Priestley was born in England in 1733. He was a Unitarian minister and a noted teacher, and wrote articles on a wide variety of subjects. He stressed the importance of education and of independent inquiry. “Through [science]," he wrote, "the security and happiness of mankind are daily improved.” A friend of Benjamin Franklin, Priestley moved to the United States of America in 1794. His sermons in Philadelphia did much to spread Unitarianism before he settled in Northumberland, PA, where he died ten years later. (See http://www.josephpriestleyhouse.org/ for more information.) The UU Joseph Priestley District encompasses southern Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and northern Virginia.