Under Mingyu Fan’s leadership, we realized the first laser cooling and trapping of ²²⁴Ra⁺ ions, an isotope of radium which has a half-life of only 3.6 days. This achievement marks a significant step towards the lab’s goals of probing new physics with short lived radium ions. Radium atoms were produced from an effusive oven source, the culmination of several years of development led by Mingyu Fan and Max Ladabaum. A marked outcome of this research is the reliability of our radium atom source, which continues to produce radium atoms on demand nearly a year after being sealed in vacuum. The team first observed fluorescence of neutral ²²⁴Ra atoms in a vacuum chamber test bed, which Haoran Li and Spencer Kofford later used for a spectroscopy of the atom’s 483 nanometer transition. This frequency measurement enabled us to effectively photoionize ²²⁴Ra once the oven source was moved to the vacuum chamber that houses our ion trap. Mingyu Fan and Roy Ready spearheaded tests to determine effective methods to trap radium ions, including various photoionization schemes and oven operating temperatures. With the ability to routinely trap single and multi-ion chains for days, we are able to see ions occasionally disappear, presumably due to nuclear decay. The article describing this work was published in Physical Review Research, and is also available on the arXiv.