While their J-Term research was successful, Hadi Abdul (r) wasn’t quite as good as his partner Tess Totten (l) at remembering to always wear one's safety goggles. (photo: Brian Faircloth)
The just-completed January Term at North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics is perhaps one of the most fascinating months at the school. Across both the Durham and Morganton campuses, students had the opportunity to step outside of the traditional academic catalog and choose from almost 140 topics of special interest to them that ranged from “geeky” on-campus mini-courses to cultural immersions in other countries.
No matter which J-Term course a student participated in, the focus has always been the opportunity to explore something new.
For students in the Research Experience in Chemistry J-Term course taught by NCSSM-Durham chemistry instructor Darrell Spells, that meant spending four weeks doing introductory-level chemistry research.
This is only the second year that Spells has taught the course. In both instances it was filled entirely by juniors who still have a year and a half to consider additional research courses. “It’s sort of an exploratory class for students to find out if they really have an interest in pursuing things further,” he says.
The course is split roughly into two-week segments. In the first, students learn how to formulate a research question and create a research proposal that lays out a plan for further exploration of any topic they are interested in. If reasonably feasible given the time and tools available in NCSSM laboratories, the second half of J-Term is spent carrying out that research under Spells’ supervision.
Hadi Abdul, an NCSSM-Durham junior from Northwest Cabarrus High School in Concord, and Tess Totten, another Durham junior who is originally from Asheville High School, teamed up in the second half of the term to work toward a better way of determining if perishable food goods have, indeed, gone bad. Sell-by or expiration dates seldom mean an item has actually become unsafe or unfit for consumption, resulting in an untold amount of food waste filling landfills on a daily basis. Eliminating or reducing such waste could have an incredible benefit for a number of systems, from farming to economics to the environment to food insecurity.
Hadi and Tess’ project focused on creating a biodegradable film for food packaging that would change from a faint pink color to a bright green when it sensed a change in pH levels in poultry that was spoiling. To do that, they extracted a pigment derived from cabbage that is subject to similar color changes and inserted it into a biodegradable film – a smart film, they call it – and then tested it.
Hadi chose Research Experience in Chemistry because he has always been interested in “learning the unlearned,” he says. “That’s the reason that I even came to the North Carolina School of Science and Math: to explore the unlearned. And in order to do that, I feel like having a fundamental understanding of what research is is something that’s super important.”
Further driving his enrollment in the course is the fact that his mother was diagnosed with cancer nearly one year ago. Research, Hadi knows, is the only way toward better treatments and, one day, a cure. He wants to contribute to those breakthroughs as a cancer researcher. This J-Term may just be the beginning of that. But it’s a long process, with a lot to learn about research in general.
Tess, who plans a future in neuroscience, saw the experience as an opportunity to warm up for later research at NCSSM. She already had a bit of experience in a lab, having participated in a self-organized summer mentorship at Western Carolina University, where she shadowed university-based researchers. But here in the Research in Chemistry J-Term, she says, it’s more hands-on, and more self directed, which she loves.
“Dr. Spells was definitely there to advise us and help us out if we didn’t completely understand something, but we had a lot of freedom to develop our own procedures and develop different trials as long as we stayed within the bounds of laboratory safety.”
By the end of the second half of the J-Term, the results of Hadi and Tess’ experiment were in. There were a few twists and turns the research took, Tess says, but surprisingly, she and Hadi got the result they were hoping for: the smart film actually changed color when exposed to a change in pH.
“It took us almost six hours just to extract the pigment and insert it into the plastic,” Tess says. “Had it not worked, we would have been back at square one. But thankfully – miraculously – we got very lucky.”
While happy the experiment worked out for Hadi and Tess, Spells says research results aren’t all that important in this introductory course.
“I don’t necessarily worry that much about whether or not it’s actually a ‘successful’ outcome in the four-week period,” he says, “but what I do want is for students to take on something that will give them a sense of accomplishment and open them up to what else might be possible.”
