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Date: 6/28/2023
RUSSELL — Elizabeth Hanechak of Russell, who will be entering her junior year at Pope Francis Preparatory School, did very well at the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Dallas, Texas, in May. She received a second-place, $2,000 award in microbiology.
Hanechak described the experience of competing in Texas as intimidating but “cool.” She said it was her first trip to Texas, and first time flying by herself without her mother.
“It was a little bit scary — going with people I didn’t know from different worlds. A lot of them were from the Boston area, which is a little bit of a cultural divide. A lot of them think Western Mass. is a far-off, distant place. It was a cool experience,” she said.
“It was really intimidating at first. I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there,” she added, describing the projects that were there as “incredible ideas that could change the world.” She wondered what she was doing there. “After I was there, I started to find my place. It’s not so much a competition, but a way for high school students to talk with other students that share our interests,” she said.
Hanechak said there were over 1,600 student projects.
“It was a humongous, very large competition. Everyone there was really motivated about science, really cool, extremely focused, very intelligent, very creative. It was a great experience to be able to interact with that caliber of people,” she said.
Hanechak earned the invitation to the international fair after winning the Sanofi Specialty Grand Prize Award for her biochemistry project, “The Deletion of a Disulfide Bridge through Site-Director Mutagenesis to Adapt Cutinase to the Biodegradation of Polyethylene Terephthalate.” She took that prize at the Region IV Science Fair at Western New England University on March 10.
Putting her project in plain English, Hanechak explained that she was mostly focused on trying to find a practical solution to the plastic problem. She said recycling doesn’t really work, because less than 4% of the 51 million tons of plastic in the United States gets recycled annually; and incineration isn’t safe, as burning plastic releases toxic chemicals.
Hanechak said biodegradation uses naturally occurring microorganisms to degrade the plastic, but is very slow and takes a long time, making that solution also impractical.
“My research was trying to improve an enzyme shown to degrade plastic, to make it work faster and more efficiently,” she said, adding that the experiment went pretty well, “beyond what I was hoping for — my mutations degraded the samples 55% better than [others]. One degraded an entire plastic sample within 24 hours.”
Hanechak said since Pope Francis does not have a high school science fair, she did the research on her own, reading scientific journals for months before coming up with the idea for the research proposal.
She worked with Dr. Kimberly Berman, a microbiology professor at Westfield State University, as an independent research student funded by her mother. Her high school, Pope Francis, she said, was very supportive, giving her access to most scientific journals and time off to go to the lab and to the International Science Fair in Dallas.
Berman said when she saw Hanechak’s project proposal, she thought it was ambitious for a high school student with very limited time who still had to be in school full-time, so she gave her other suggestions and ideas.
“She was determined to do this project. It was really what I would consider an upper-level undergraduate research project,” Berman said. “She wanted to take an E. coli strain and make a mutant form of an enzyme. Making a mutant form of anything is not trivial.”
Hanechak had already started to work on her next project before she left for Dallas.
“I just finished my next proposal, which goes a little deeper in this project, to make another mutant and improve it, to degrade plastic faster,” she said, adding that she will continue to work with Berman as her mentor.
She also hopes to continue her connection with the friends she made in Texas. She said there were seven female delegates from Massachusetts who have started a group chat and are staying in touch, although unfortunately all the rest live in the eastern part of the state. She also met students from Connecticut, New York, Texas, California, Denmark and Germany that she hopes to stay in touch with.
“I’m hoping to go back to ISEF. It was probably the best week of my life so far. I’m really hoping I get to go again,” Hanechak said.