Three local Oak Park and River Forest High School students will be presenting their climate-focused research after being invited to this year’s Climate of HOPE Conference.
Current senior student Katie Stabb and 2023 graduates Mateo Nery and Grace Koch will be presenting their “pioneering” research March 1 at Downers Grove North High School.
The Climate for HOPE Conference is designed to bring cutting-edge climate research, as well as classroom activities, to Illinois Science teachers.
Sponsors for the conference include the National Center for Science Education, DuPage County Regional Office of Education, the Illinois Science Teacher Association, and the U.S. Ice Drilling Program.
This year’s conference will also include keynote speaker Richard Alley, a professor of geoscience at Penn State.
The participating students conducted their research as part of the investigational research, design, and innovation class, where they conducted original research to address a gap in environmental studies.
Nery, 18, is studying computer engineering at Columbia University in New York City, but is excited to come back to Illinois for the conference, where he will be presenting his novel triboelectric nanogenerators, TENGs, which create electricity by converting mechanical energy.
For Nery, the subject for his research held significant importance because he believes it is going to have a big impact on his and future generations.
“With current estimates of how temperatures are rising, it’s depending on the efforts that countries and corporations make to try and lower their carbon footprint,” he said. “A lot of the effects of climate change are likely going to be hitting when I reach later in my life. A lot of my future is going to be impacted by decisions that are made now about how to face climate change.”
Through his research, Nery was able to fabricate the TENGs from common waste material, thus developing high-performance and eco-friendly devices.
“TENGs are largely unheard of, yet their current performance in research has demonstrated they could be a viable energy source in the future,” Nery said in a news release.
Nery said he is excited to get to speak about his work, to which he has devoted a lot of time and effort.
Fellow OPRF ‘23 graduate Grace Koch will also be traveling back home from the United States Naval Academy in Maryland, where she is pursuing mechanical engineering, to attend the conference.
“I am super excited,” Koch said. “It has been a long year and I have been through boot camp and school so to go back to my roots back home and meet mentors and people I have worked with is surreal. I think it is also fun to be able to represent the Navy in a good way.”
For her research, Koch focused on the thermal conductivity of metals used by the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, COLDEX, which is a multi-institution collaboration that explores Antarctica to collect the oldest possible polar ice samples with the aim of gaining understanding of the Earth’s climate system. Koch was looking at how to optimize their ICE Diver, which is used to collect ice samples in the form of ice cores, which are cylinders of ice drilled from ice sheets and glaciers.
“I was basically looking to see if I could optimize their drill using 3-D printing,” Koch said. “But you really can’t optimize it until you know how the metals behave in Antarctic conditions.”
Koch said she has always been interested in learning more about climate change, as well as clean and nuclear energy.
“To be, nuclear [energy] has a ton of promise, if we just get more investment into it,” Koch said. “So, to me, I was starting at the surface about ‘how can I focus on nuclear energy for a high school project.’ You can’t really work with anything nuclear so I went down to the manufacturing level.”
By focusing on 3D printing, Koch said she was able to limit a ton of waste as well as reduce emissions and optimize the production of nuclear reactors.
Her research only solidified her interest in climate work.
“I think it comes with my generation,” Koch said. “I think all of us want to be the ones to save the world or maybe it’s just my mindset.”
Stabb’s research focused on how diluted bitumen, which is carried through pipelines in the Midwest and Canada can affect the growth of wild rice, which she said is both an ecological risk as well as a cultural one, because rice can be highly important to indigenous communities.
Inspired by a science webinar she watched last year, Stabb’s recalled how it was mentioned that not much is known about the oil product that is being carried by many proposed pipelines. This inspired her choice for a research topic.
While she ran into some hardships during the process of her research, which included getting an oil sample from a Canadian government laboratory and working with wild rice seeds that had not undergone a proper germination process, she was eventually able to source her materials.
Stabb’s findings demonstrated that an 8% concentration of dilbit in sediment was harming wild rice plants.
“I am really excited [to present],” Stabb said. “It is something that I put a lot of time into and I care a lot about. I just hope other people found it interesting.”
While Stabb is still figuring out what she would like to pursue after high school, she said she definitely would want it to have an environmental component. She is applying for environmental engineering college programs, yet would also like to maintain the humanity aspect of it.
Always advocating for the “power of curiosity,” Stabb said she hopes other students can find what piques their interest and passions.
More information regarding the 2024 Climate of HOPE Conference, along with a registration link can be found online.
According to a press release sent out by OPRF, the IRDI students have a history of taking top honors at a wide range of regional, state, and even national science conferences.
