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Grace Sun, 16 years old from Kentucky, won $75,000 for her research on biomedical devices.
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She took home the top prize at the ISEF – “the granddaddy of all science fairs.”
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Her work on organic electronic devices aims to make medical implants safer and more effective.
Grace Sun still can’t drive. Unlike many 16-year-olds, getting her license was not her priority. Instead, she is busy working on a project to revolutionize biomedicine.
The high school from Lexington, Kentucky, developed a new technique to improve organic electronic devices. The technology could make medical implants much more compatible with the human body and much less invasive. It could also lead to new early diagnostic tools for a wide range of diseases.
On Friday she won $75,000 for her research.
“They called my name. I thought they got the wrong person. I was like, is there another Grace here?” Sun told Business Insider backstage at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) awards ceremony.
His hands were shaking and a huge smile appeared across his face. Moments earlier, rainbow confetti exploded behind her on stage in front of hundreds of her peers, while lights flashed and peppy music boomed above the audience. She suddenly held a trophy in her hands.
“I’m in disbelief because of how good everyone else is,” she said.
Despite the exhilaration, however, the Sun easily slipped into a calm and authoritative recovery to explain her research, which focused on organic electrochemical transistors, or OECTs.
“They have performance problems right now,” she said of the devices. “They have instability in the body. You do not want some kind of bioelectronic implant to degrade in your body.”
But OECTs have huge potential. Compared to other devices made of silicon, they are soft and flexible. This makes them more suitable for heart and brain implants.
“They are much more accurate, their speed is higher, their performance is higher because they consider signals in the body that electronics did not consider before. They are also safe because they are made of organic materials,” she said. .
She hopes that her work to improve their performance can be the first step towards their commercialization and widespread use within the next two decades.
Sun won the Olympic games of science fairs
ISEF is the world’s largest pre-college STEM competition, run by the Society for Science. It’s like the Olympics of science or “the granddaddy of all science fairs,” said chairman of judges Christopher Gould.
Nearly 2,000 students spent the week in Los Angeles attending talks, mingling, and defending their research to judges. The event awarded $9 million in awards this year – the largest purse yet. But Sun took home the biggest prize with the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award.
“This was our flagship project, without a doubt,” Ian Jandrell, judging co-chair for the materials science category at ISEF, told BI about Sun’s research. He oversaw hours of discussion among the material science judges.
“It was clear that the chamber was convinced that this was a significant project and worthy of consideration for a very high award because of what was added,” he said.
Research at ISEF is not peer-reviewed, so it is not up to the standard that studies published in journals such as Nature or JAMA must meet. Instead, ISEF encourages students to learn about the scientific process by defending themselves and their work.
Jandrell said the judges were impressed with the “sophistication and diligence” of Sun’s research and her ability to explain it and answer questions on the spot.
“It’s the whole package,” he said.
Long days in a university laboratory
Sun has been working on her project for over six months. It took long hours, and a lot of it had to be done in a laboratory at the University of Kentucky. The devices she worked on were tiny, small enough to fit on your thumb.
For a few weeks, she left school three hours early to work in a laboratory for another five hours. Fortunately, her teachers understood why she needed extensions on some of her assignments.
Sun engineered a new technique to improve the performance of the devices and bring them closer to commercial use. In the research that won the five-figure award, Sun tried to “dope” the OECTs – introducing chemical impurities to see how they affected the device’s electrical properties – with a series of organic salts.
She found that one salt, called tetrabutylammonium chloride, was particularly effective because it improved the device’s amplification capability, sensitivity, signal-to-noise ratio, and transfer speed.
These qualities are important because they improve overall performance, which could one day help create biomedical devices that can detect early signs of disease in your body’s biochemical makeup.
The salt tested by the Sun improved amplification performance by 97% and transfer speed by 77%, Sun found. “These are significant numbers,” Jandrell said.
Sensitive OECTs may detect disease-relevant proteins or nucleic acids long before conventional symptoms appear. The sun imagines OECTs embedded in clothing to monitor sweat or used to accurately test blood alcohol levels before you drive.
Finally, OECTs may lead to new technologies that replace invasive implants such as pacemakers.
As for Sun, she sees a future for herself in chemical engineering to help improve medicine.
“Hopefully I can do some kind of commercialization, like what I’m trying to do now with these devices,” Sun said. “If possible, I want to start a business so that I can bring them into the real world in industries to directly affect more people.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
