Students take algae-to-biofuel project to MIT
By J.T. LEONARD, Staff Writer
Saturday, November 4, 2006
Staff photo by Gordon Chibroski
Tessa Churchill, left, and Holly Jacobson show bottles of algae that are part of their algae-to-biofuel research. The Greely High seniors are at MIT today for a national science competition.
Holly Jacobson and Tessa Churchill, seniors at Greely High School in Cumberland, are at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology today, explaining how they would use fast-growing algae to help solve the energy crisis.
In a nutshell, the young women may have found a way to produce more biodiesel fuel while consuming fewer organic resources.
The project got its start two years ago when Jacobson and Churchill began examining natural oils stored in fatty acids -- called lipids -- in various forms of marine algae. Recently, they identified a strain of algae that produces more oil for a given mass.
They are at MIT to present their findings to a panel of university judges, who will weigh their project against those of three other teams in the regional finals of the sixth annual Siemens Math, Science & Technology competition.
The event is sponsored each year by The College Board and is funded by the Siemens Foundation as a way to give students a chance to achieve national recognition for science research projects.
To gain entry into the competition, Churchill, 17, and Jacobson, 18, wrote a scientific paper describing their project and its results.
Each year, judges assembled by The College Board and Educational Testing Service review entries and select as many as 300 projects as semifinalists, according to the competition's Web site.
As many as 30 individual students and 30 teams of two or three students are chosen to compete in six regional competitions.
First prize in the regional competition is a $6,000 scholarship, a trip to December's national finals in New York City and a shot at the top prize, a $100,000 scholarship.
Jacobson and Churchill have worked on the project since they were sophomores.
"It started as a project in a science research course. Holly actually had the idea and about a month later we kind of turned into a team," Churchill said. "It definitely had to do with the oil crisis and everybody talking about finding some other substitute for fossil fuels, so we started researching algae. It grows very rapidly, and it grows in environments that won't support other food stocks so space wouldn't be taken up that could be used for growing food."
"We started generally looking into biodiesel, but it wasn't until last year that we started identifying the specific lipids," Jacobson said.
The competition covers a wide range of topics, and the students' work is sophisticated, said Jim Whaley, president of the Siemens Foundation.
"A lot of these kids are doing work at a Ph.D level," he said.
The top prize winner in 2005 was a San Diego student who applied four mathematical theories to crack a previously unsolved 19th-century math problem. The student then applied his solution to modern steel production to show how it could be used to heat and form metals in modern-day construction and engineering projects.
Students have 20 minutes to make their cases before the judges. "Then they go and meet with some of the best professors in their field and they get asked questions. It's just like what would happen if you were defending a doctoral thesis," Whaley said. "You can't help but feel very confident about the future after you look at these projects and talk to these kids."
Regardless of the competition's results, more work awaits back home. "At the University of New Hampshire they're already working on wide-scale production to replace fossil fuels," Churchill said. "The only things holding us back right now are funding and that a lot of energy has to be put into the process to get biodiesel back from it."
Staff Writer J.T. Leonard can be contacted at 791-6368 or at:
jleonard@pressherald.com
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