Young Scholar Program Comes Full Circle

In the summer of 1995, when North­eastern assis­tant pro­fessor Matthew J. Eck­elman was a rising senior at Brain­tree High School, he felt the Earth move—or at least a small part of it.

Eck­elman was a par­tic­i­pant in Northeastern’s Young Scholars Pro­gram, a six-​​week paid research expe­ri­ence for Boston-​​area high school stu­dents led by Claire Duggan from the Center for STEM Edu­ca­tion. The pro­gram, now in its 19th year, rocked his world.

The bud­ding researcher was assigned to the lab of Mishac K. Yegian, now COE Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor of Civil and Envi­ron­mental Engi­neering. There, with a fellow scholar in the pro­gram, he con­ducted earth­quake sim­u­la­tion exper­i­ments to eval­uate the sta­bility of dif­ferent land­fill liner systems—the plastic mem­branes that pre­vent liq­uids from seeping through land­fills and con­t­a­m­i­nating the groundwater.

“Our job was to set up big boxes of sand with dif­ferent liner sys­tems and sim­u­late an earth­quake on the lab’s shaker table,” Eck­elman says now, sit­ting in his office in the Snell Engi­neering Center. “It was very exciting. We’d press a button, there was a lot of action, and then we’d look at the sand dis­place­ment and for rips in the liners.”

Today Eckelman—who credits the pro­gram with having intro­duced him to engi­neering practice—has come full circle. This summer he hosted two high school seniors in his North­eastern lab, guiding them, with the help of co-​​mentor and doc­toral stu­dent Abhi­jeet Par­vatker, in researching energy use and emis­sions from the pro­duc­tion of indus­trial chem­i­cals, which typ­i­cally have low effi­cien­cies. Their find­ings will help Eck­elman and his col­leagues build robust chem­ical life­cycle inven­to­ries to assess where in the process improve­ments for sus­tain­ability can be made.

“These inven­to­ries get used by thou­sands of researchers all around the world,” says Eck­elman. “But the number of chem­i­cals cur­rently included from the phar­ma­ceu­tical sector is very low. The work of these young scholars will essen­tially mul­tiply times 10 the amount of avail­able infor­ma­tion on such compounds.”

Real-​​world contributions

That stu­dents can make such a con­tri­bu­tion while still in high school is unprece­dented, notes Duggan, director for pro­grams and oper­a­tions for Northeastern’s Center for STEM Edu­ca­tion. “Many alumni state YSP was a pow­erful expe­ri­ence that had a direct impact on their aca­d­emic and career pathway,” she says. “Other uni­ver­si­ties have summer research pro­grams but often don’t have the suc­cess that we’ve had, with data showing the high per­centage of par­tic­i­pants who go on to pursue STEM pathways.”

The num­bers tell the story: According to annual sur­veys of the more than 400 YSP par­tic­i­pants through 2015, 91 per­cent reported that the pro­gram increased their aware­ness of STEM career path­ways and 89 per­cent believed they would choose a STEM major in college.

Hands-​​on research is the heart of the pro­gram: This year, 17 fac­ulty men­tors hosted 34 scholars—two in each lab—on projects ranging from nan­otech­nology for drug delivery to imaging tech­nology for airport-​​security applications.

“That setup gives them the oppor­tu­nity to con­tribute to the big pic­ture, not just com­plete a task,” says Par­vatker, PhD’21, who con­ducted life­cycle assess­ments in industry before coming to Northeastern.

Eckelman’s two scholars have been thrilled at the real-​​world appli­ca­tions of their research.

Mary­Beth Rockett, a rising senior at Needham High School, used mod­eling soft­ware to con­vert patents and indus­trial chem­istry “recipes” for anes­thesia drugs into chem­ical reac­tion and process flow dia­grams showing every inter­me­diate chem­ical step required to pro­duce the final drug. “I never even knew that this whole career path existed,” she says. “This pro­gram opens your eyes past high school classes to the long-​​term goals down the road.”

Louis Sokolow, a rising senior from Brook­line High School, agrees. He used Aspen­Plus soft­ware to sim­u­late pro­duc­tion of chem­i­cals such as ethyl acetate, often used in industry as a sol­vent, to eval­uate trade-​​offs between energy use and reac­tion yields to learn the most energy-​​efficient ways of making the chem­i­cals. “I knew I was inter­ested in chem­istry, but that’s so broad,” he says. “The life­cycle assess­ment work gave me a con­crete example of chem­istry research. Now I’m thinking about studying green chem­istry, which is so impor­tant as we face cli­mate change.”

Out­side the lab

The pro­gram com­ple­ments the in-​​lab expe­ri­ence with out­side field trips, lec­tures, tuto­rials, and social events.

The Best: A summer at North­eastern with 25 of the greatest people I’ve ever met.
— Matthew Eck­elman, YSP Year­book 1995

For example, in daily home­room meet­ings YSP staff engage stu­dents in engi­neering and design chal­lenges and guide them through the devel­op­ment of their col­lege essays and LinkedIn pro­files. In addi­tion North­eastern admin­is­tra­tors pro­vide detailed infor­ma­tion regarding finan­cial aid, co-​​op oppor­tu­ni­ties, and the col­lege appli­ca­tion process. “I didn’t expect that,” says Rockett. “It was so generous.”

Weekly tours of cor­po­rate and gov­ern­ment research sites around the state open doors to agen­cies such as the Mass­a­chu­setts Clean Energy Center, in Boston, and com­mer­cial out­fits such as Akamai, a con­tent delivery net­work in Cam­bridge. Fac­ulty pre­sen­ta­tions intro­duce the scholars to research in areas from 3-​​D printing com­pos­ites to detec­tion strate­gies for per­son­al­ized med­i­cine and envi­ron­mental monitoring.

So it’s no sur­prise that both Rockett and Sokolow exclaim how the pro­gram exceeded their expec­ta­tions. “Everyone was so wel­coming,” says Rockett. “We had our strug­gles in the begin­ning with making the soft­ware work, but our men­tors were so won­derful in guiding us through.” Adds Sokolow: “I had no idea how much I would learn, not just from my lab, but from observing in other labs.”

Their com­ments echo Eckelman’s “final thoughts” in his own YSP Year­book from decades ago: “The Best: A summer at North­eastern with 25 of the greatest people I’ve ever met.”