Project Lead the Way engineering excellence in Firestone
students
Part II: The Research Division
By Mike D’Agruma
WEST AKRON — Biodiesel production by transesterification using native and solubilized lipase enzyme.
Try saying it three times fast.
Perhaps, in this case, the most clichéd challenge isn’t exactly the best. Instead, try saying it once — and understanding it.
Ask Ryan Brosnahan and Justin Perry to and they will meet that challenge with incredible ease. The title rolls off their tongues as easily as the explanation of what it means. To be fair, the two have spent more than two years researching the subject alongside doctoral graduate students at The University of Akron (UA). Their knowledge is expected.
What isn’t expected is their age. Brosnahan and Perry, who have spent so much time in the ranks of the collegiate elite, are seniors at Firestone High School. They are part of a unique high school engineering program called Project Lead the Way (PLTW), a four-year extracurricular program designed to expose students to engineering, prepare them to attend an engineering university or college and instruct them on various engineering disciplines.
PLTW may only be four years old, but teacher Dan Spak has made the most of them by fostering a synergistic relationship between Firestone and UA. He’s had professors and students visit his class — not only to show his students what engineers do at the collegiate level, but also to show engineers what his students can do at the high school level.
The synergy has seven of Spak’s seniors working on two different UA projects — one dealing with a design problem and the other research based. The research project Brosnahan and Perry worked on was part of UA completing requirements for an outreach grant, part of those requirements requiring UA to utilize the research talents of high school students.
On Spak’s end, he wasn’t content to just select two competent students, but two that would complement each other. He also had one other requirement.
“He told us not to disgrace the program or anything,” Perry said.
The research project had Brosnahan and Perry working 10-week sessions in UA labs alongside graduate students during the summers before their junior and senior years. They spent 30 to 50 hours a week doing research, writing lab reports and holding meetings with supervisors.
Their research centered on an alternative fuel, biodiesel — a diesel fuel substitute derived directly from soybean oil and alcohols, or from other kinds of vegetable oil. Brosnahan said the research narrows to a soybean oil focus partly because soybean oil is a cash crop of Ohio, which makes it a viable economic option if their biodiesel was put into production.
Performing collegiate-level research on a soybean-based fuel alone seemed to be a tall task for a pair of high school students — particularly students that hadn’t even taken a high school chemistry class when they started. But the project didn’t end there.
Enter methods of production. Instead of using dangerous and not environmentally sound catalysts to make the biodiesel, researching an entirely organic process from start to finish was also part of the project. From start to finish included the catalysts, which in this case was lipase, an enzyme produced by the human body in the upper intestines and pancreas.
“At first it seemed like it was going to be a little overwhelming, as we didn’t know if we were really going to be able to understand everything,” Perry said. “But after a couple of weeks, we kind of picked it up and were able to mostly do our own stuff without too much help.”
A couple of weeks included what Brosnahan said were crash courses in organic chemistry and other science disciplines. As they made progress in their learning, they were allowed to make decisions on their own. Their work on campus ultimately culminated in a paper written with a UA professor to hopefully be published in the scientific journal Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology. The research is being confirmed during the final editing stage.
Brosnahan and Perry are two of a kind. A rare kind. As the first duo to attempt the research project, they will go down in PLTW history as catalysts for the program’s continued successful relationship with UA. If Spak was ever worried about the two disgracing the program, his fears were officially laid to rest the minute UA began knocking on his door requesting more student teams.
“Excellence isn’t
accidental — and that really holds true here,”
Brosnahan said after quoting the PLTW slogan. “We
didn’t just go in there and fool around. ... The
engineering program — it really has some
of the best students in the school and we’re really
proud to be [a part of it].”
Justin Perry, left, and Ryan Brosnahan are shown with their presentation board detailing an extensive engineering research project the two participated in at The University of Akron.
Photo: Mike D’Agruma
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