Whiz Kid Grows Algae Under Bed & Wins $100,000 Intel Science Prize

Last week a Colorado Springs high school senior won first prize and $100,000 at the Intel Science Talent Search for her experiment of growing populations of algae under her loft bed.  The contestant Sara Volz, 17, of Colorado Springs researched ways to create populations of algae cells with high oil content; this algae oil can be converted into an economically feasible biofuel. “It’s something she’s worked on for years, and that shows a certain passion and drive that you don’t always see in heavily mentored projects,” said David Marker, a mathematics professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the chairman of the judging panel. “And what really set her off was that she’s so well-rounded in all areas of science — I was able to ask her very advanced math questions that she answers easily.”

Algae biofuel has long fascinated the green energy community as a promising alternative to other biofuels, such as corn-based ethanol, that take a bite out of the world’s food budget. But a problem has been to get the plants to produce oil at scale cheaply enough to compete with petroleum-based fuel. Other researchers have approached the problem by tweaking the algae genome or selecting the prime environmental conditions for algae growth. Volz’s approach, she said, is different and lower cost. It relies on an herbicide that kills algae cells with low levels of an enzyme crucial to making oil. “The idea is, if you introduce this chemical, you kill everything with really low oil production,” she explained. “What you are left with is a population of cells with very high oil production.”

Volz grew (and killed) the algae under her bed, where she has set up a home laboratory with flasks, microscopes, and everything else a young scientist needs. She developed her interest in algae biofuels in the ninth grade as a “perfect fusion” of her passions in alternative energy and biochemistry. The young scientist should find access to a bigger lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she’ll enroll this fall. The prize money, she said, “will cover a significant chunk of those expenses.”