PUMA brings science to underprivileged high–schoolers
By Shannon Swilley

The Princeton Center for Complex Materials (PCCM) is making spies, material scientists, and cancer researchers out of high school students from diverse backgrounds with the Princeton University Materials Academy (PUMA).

This summer PCCM held three PUMA sessions each providing intensive science and engineering training through lectures and labs and the students were asking for more.

“ The unofficial slogan of the PUMA program this summer became, “We want more!” said Dan Steinberg, PCCM education outreach director. “The students always wanted more science and engineering. They all said they want to come for more next year.”

Photo by Dan Steinberg Isaac Grigsby, a member of the PUMA/Upward Bound program, performs cancer research in the lab of Wolé Soboyejo, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

In the first PUMA session, students participating in Mentor Power, a mentor program for Lawrence and Trenton high school students, were trained in espionage, imaginatively applying materials science to spy missions.

Middlesex High School students were given an introduction to materials science in the second PUMA session.

Students from Trenton who are part of the pre-college program Upward Bound attended the third session, most for the third year in a row. Wolé Soboyejo, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) and his research team led the students through his most recent experiments of cancer cell detection.

Dr. Steinberg and high school science teacher Pete Gange developed the curricula for the sessions. Jay Benziger, professor of chemical engineering, Steve Forrest, professor of electrical engineering, Yiguang Ju, MAE assistant professor, George Scherer, professor of civil and environmental engineering, Professor Soboyejo, and others provided the concepts for the lessons.

“ The main goal is to introduce these students to materials science and engineering—subjects not taught in their schools,” said Dr. Steinberg. “At the same time we want to build on their science base knowledge to improve their experience when they return to school.”

Mission Possible
In a vigorous two-week training session, this summer’s first group of PUMA students were briefed on materials science and its use in international espionage.

Sixteen high school students from Trenton and Lawrence townships learned about the materials science through “spy missions” designed by the PCCM outreach team.

The spies-in-training learned to sneak by a motion detector by applying their knowledge of angles, sensors, and velocity to determine the device’s limitations.

To see how well they would fare creeping across the slanted rooftop of an enemy’s lair, they tested their shoes’ static friction using geometry and materials science.

Professor Forrest introduced students to new technologies that will advance the field of international espionage, such as organic light- emitting devices.

Students in this group also built microphones out of a piezo-electric polymer called Kynar®. In doing this, they learned how pressure, even from sound waves, could make this polarized polymer create electric current.

With new knowledge the students imagined all sorts of wild new “smart sensors,” devices that react to a specific sensory input. Two of the brainchilren were a sensor that can detect explosives on a vehicle and a lock that releases with a flash of light.

“ I never had a bad day there,” student Will Williams said. “It’s better than school! Everything’s interesting.”

All students in this session were members of Mentor Power.

“ Although these students came to us with varied backgrounds in math and science concepts, they now enter the next school year with confidence that they can achieve a firm grasp on these and many more advanced concepts,” said Dr. Steinberg. “It’s clear we sparked their imaginations.”

Materials 101
PCCM partnered up with Middlesex High School to give a collection of their students a five-day PUMA introduction to materials science.

Professor Scherer led them on a tour of campus, normally reserved for Princeton University students, illustrating the properties of the materials used in building some of Princeton’s most noteworthy architectural structures. He let them know the inside secrets of modern methods of preserving very old buildings.

Professor Ju and his students opened up their lab on microcombustion and Physics Professor Paul Chaikin introduced the students to random packing of ellipsoids with M&Ms®.

The students were trained in using such advanced equipment as the scanning electron microscope. They visited Princeton research facilities at PCCM and at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL).

Cancer detection
In the third PUMA session, sixteen high school students from inner-city Trenton reproduced groundbreaking results in cancer cell detection so cutting edge they have not yet been published.

These students retraced Pofessor Soboyejo’s steps in detecting cancer cells with BioMEMS (microscopic machines that work with the human body) and cantilevers as small as one-fiftieth of the diameter of a human hair. The results of the research are still uncertain.

Photo by Dan Steinberg Detlev Yanez (left), Hezekiah McRae and Turquoise Gaynor work on a challenging spy mission.

“ I probably would have never heard of this for another 10 years [without PUMA],” said one student.

Rather than using an atomic force microscope (AFM) to map the surface of a substance atom by atom, as it is designed to do, Professor Soboyejo and PUMA students used its microscopic cantilever to detect cancer in low-concentration solutions.

With the help of graduate student Joyelle Jones, post doctoral researcher Jikou Zhou, and research assistant Philip Chacko, they completed labs as steps to detect cancer with the AFM.

They used micropipettes to test samples and hemocytometry to count cells in Princeton labs with the help of Lauren Hayward ’05 and Lara Ionescu ’06. The students’ math skills were reinforced as Adaora Okwo ’05 and Senayet Agonafer ’05 guided them through the complex calculations.

“ So many people from Professor Soboyejo’s lab helped out, that we created the best ratio of teachers to students that I have ever seen for this type of an outreach program,” said Dr. Steinberg. “If you include myself, our lead teacher Pete Gange, and assistant teacher Zach Benziger, the ratio came to 11 teachers to 16 students.”

“ PUMA allows me to learn more about my interests, one of which is science, and the career I want to pursue in the future, which is engineering,” said one student. “This program definitely helped me the most since I enrolled in school.”

All the students of this session of PUMA were recruited from Mercer County Community College’s Upward Bound program as part of an ongoing partnership with PCCM. Upward Bound is a pre-college program for Trenton high school students who are “educationally and economically disadvantaged, but who have the desire and potential to succeed in post-secondary institutions,” as described in their mission statement.

PCCM Education Outreach has programs throughout the year for K-12 students, undergraduates, and teachers at all levels to enhance science education in the United States. All of PCCM’s outreach programs are made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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