Katherine Nurminsky is interested in the environment. She's certainly not alone in that. But, thanks to a program of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, Nurminsky, a sophomore at The Bryn Mawr School, will have an opportunity to do research on the subject.
Katherine, 15, of Lutherville, won a $599 grant from the Center for Talented Youth (CTY) Cogito Research Awards for middle and high school STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) students.
She proposed a project involving geothermal, an alternative energy source and was one of 10 winners for the national awards, which were announced in January. Winning students, who are teamed with a virtual mentor from the youth center faculty for their research, turn in a final report in August.
"I was so happy to get the award because it was for an idea I came up with on something that is happening in the world and that I could do something about," said Katherine, daughter of Maria Nurminskaya and Dmitry Nurminsky.
This is only the second year that Cogito.org, a website and online community to encourage middle and high school students' interest in math and science, has sponsored the awards. Located on the Hopkins Homewood campus, Cogito is produced at the youth center.
The contest is open to middle and high school students who submit proposals for research projects. "Applicants must be member of Cogito but they don't have to be CTY kids," said Kristi Birch, managing editor of Cogito.org. "They can get a teacher's recommendation" to apply.
Ten winning projects are chosen for grants of $599 each, to pay for equipment, lab space and other project-related needs. Individuals or teams may submit projects.
In 2014, Cogito Research Awards' inaugural year, two of the winning projects were submitted by two-person teams. This year, 186 research projects were submitted, and all the winning proposals were from individuals.
In the two years that the awards have been offered, applicants have ranged in age from 13 to 18. "The proposals are astoundingly good. It's humbling," said Birch, who added that the final reports only have to describe the process of doing the research, whatever the outcome.
"They don't have to guarantee success of their project," she said of the award winners.
Applications for the awards come from around the country and even, for last year's contest, an application from South Korea. "Katherine was the only winner from Baltimore although we had a couple of other winners from Maryland," Birch said.
A panel of science faculty from the CTY judges the proposals. Criteria are feasibility, originality, design, scholarly significance and applicability to the real world. Said Birch, "We're not asking the students to invent something but to articulate the problem they're trying to solve and how their research project can solve it."
For her research, Katherine plans to evaluate water barriers for geothermal pipes and help improve non fossil-fuel burning heating methods.
"The idea with geothermal is that you get heat from the earth and it's not as obvious as solar panels," said Katherine, who takes STEM electives at Bryn Mawr.
However, although geothermal technology is an alternative to furnaces that burn fossil fuels, drilling for geothermal can be a problem. In particular, if anhyberite, a mineral found in the ground, comes in contact with water, it becomes gypsum, which causes the earth to rise.
"It affects buildings and the local environment," said Katherine, whose research will experiment with different methods to waterproof the geothermal pipes that are used to bring up the underground heat.
"I haven't found any research that anyone's worked on this problem before. But this is a problem that does come up" in geothermal, she said.
According to Birch, the Cogito awards judges were impressed with Katherine's proposal because it dealt with a specific issue and how to fix it.
"Katherine is working on something that has real world application to a serious problem," Birch said. "She is doing the project in a way that also addresses poverty issues. In her application, she said the government could use [geothermal] in affordable housing to reduce heating bills."
As for Katherine, she couldn't be happier. "This is an opportunity to do research on something that interests you," she said of the Cogito awards. "They give you money and a mentor. It's amazing."