Intern makes huge impact on nanotechnology

Rob Sobelman thought researching the technique of creating carbon nanotubes would be boring. He ended up making a major scientific discovery.

USA Today

It began when the Staples High School senior landed a plum summer internship working with a researcher credited with helping discover carbon nanotubes — microscopic structures whose unique electrical properties are advancing the field of miniaturization.

Working in a lab of graduate and doctorate students, the 17-year-old was asked to study the 20-year-old process of making nanotubes. He was disappointed.

"I felt like I was put back in first grade and told to learn how to read again," Rob said. "I had already studied the process, I wanted to work on the application."

But Rob capitalized on the perceived step backward. In a four-week stint at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he discovered how to improve that process dramatically — a finding that recently won him second place in the regional finals of the prestigious Siemens Westinghouse Competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Nearly 1,000 students from New England submitted reports for the competition, which, with two Intel-sponsored contests, attracts the toughest competition. Rob came in second to a Massachusetts student who discovered a cancer treatment that affects only bad cells, unlike chemotherapy.

"I don’t feel bad losing to the guy who cured cancer," he said.

For his part, Rob discovered that heating to 1,000 degrees Celsius during the process of making carbon nanotubes not only produced significantly more of them, but it also made them longer and straighter — a major benefit in using the structures, such as in computers and transistors.

"It’s groundbreaking," said A.J. Scheetz, the science research program director at Staples High School. "The next step in the process is figuring out how to make those conditions so that nanotubes can be mass-produced."

Nanotubes are prized because of their microscopic size, a billionth of a meter, and strength, tougher than diamond.

At the RPI lab, Rob questioned the temperature, between 850 to 950 degrees Celsius, being used to make the nanotubes. It appeared arbitrary, he said, and he began testing different temperatures. He hit the jackpot at 1,000 degrees.

"I was surprised it made that much of a difference," he said.

Rob, who applied for an early decision from the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in science in middle school.

"What I find interesting about science is that it is explaining the unexplained," he said. "It’s a philosophy of real things."

He studied the nanotechnology field in Staples’ three-year science research program, which was formed after a student, Mariangela Lisanti, won the Siemens and both Intel-sponsored competitions in 2001.

Four of Connecticut’s eight semifinalists in the recent Siemens contest were from Staples.

"Rob is just one example of the great students in that program," said Scheetz, a former Yale University research scientist.

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