Summer school supreme
High schoolers don lab gear for Project SEED at Rice

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Here are two lessons worth learning: Be nice to everyone, and never discount the value of a chance meeting.

	TOMMY LAVERGNE
	High school students Ryan Hammerly and Lillian Bodunrin will spend the remainder of the summer working in the nanotech lab of Rice’s Andrew Barron as part of Project SEED.

Two Greater Houston high schoolers working their dream summer jobs at Rice University are glad graduate student Alvin Orbaek put those lessons into practice.

Ryan Hammerly and Lillian Bodunrin, who will be seniors at Hightower High School in Missouri City, will spend eight weeks at Rice learning to make and manipulate nanoparticles on a grant from Project SEED, a 4-decade-old initiative by the American Chemical Society (ACS) to draw high school students into the sciences. The program is making its debut in Houston at Rice.

Orbaek, who is doing his graduate work in the lab of Andrew Barron, Rice’s Charles W. Duncan Jr.-Welch Professor of Chemistry and professor of materials science, was in the right place — an ACS meeting in Salt Lake City — at the right time earlier this year.

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A nice guy to begin with, Orbaek was in a hotel computer room tweaking his presentation on using silver nanoparticles as an educational tool. He noticed an elderly man who needed help with his presentation and dove in.

That man was John Sheats, former administrator of Project SEED, and when the two started talking, they saw an opportunity.

“He said, ‘All right, there’s an obvious connection,'” recalled Orbaek, who contacted Project SEED upon returning to Rice. But Orbaek hit a roadblock. “They said, ‘No, not a chance. You’ll have to wait until next year.'”

Sheats advised him not to take “no” for an answer. “He said, ‘Boards are always like that. They just want to fob it off until next time. Let’s just do it.'”

Quick work by Orbaek, Barron and Mary McHale, a Rice lecturer in chemistry, secured the grant, and Barron hired Mallam Phillips to serve as mentor to the students he recruited. Phillips is a Hightower science teacher who has taken part in education within the Barron research group through a program offered by the Rice-based Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology.

Orbaek and Barron were surprised Project SEED hadn’t taken root in Houston long ago. “We have 4.5 million people and a large chemical industry. And yet the ACS had never been able to get this program going here. That was one aspect that catalyzed our ability to get the grant,” Orbaek said. They hope the project will continue at Rice in the years to come.

Hammerly and Bodunrin are spending the first few weeks at the Dell Butcher Hall lab learning to control the size of silver nanoparticles. “We want to get them used to being in the lab, get their feet on the ground,” Orbaek said. “I’ll shadow them a considerable amount at the start, and then Mallam will work with them directly.”

By summer’s end, he hopes the students will have a good understanding of how a university research lab works, as well as basic techniques in the creation of nanoparticles and the opportunities they present.

“I find nanotechnology is an easy way to cleave into the mind of a young person, because it’s something they can fathom a lot faster than, for example, the size of an atom,” he said. “For a budding scientist, engineer or someone who’s interested in developing technology, the possibilities are limitless.”

The program was put together so fast, he said, that finding students to take part could have been a real challenge. But Phillips booked Hammerly quickly and, knowing her potential, pursued Bodunrin. “Even though she’d been told about it, she didn’t realize the full potential of the program at first,” Orbaek said.

“All of a sudden, the penny dropped. ‘I’m going to be working, getting paid and at Rice University.’ It was almost too good to be true.”