Frugal Science Brings Research Opportunities to High Schoolers medal in the 2018 iGEM competition. Their work was eventually published in the journal PLOS Biology in 2019, giving the high schoolers their first scholarly citation before they had even graduated. “It’s inspirational for students to see other teenagers getting to be first authors from an intense research experience,” said Standeven. Bioengineering PhD sudent Elio Challita has been mentoring Lambert students in the lab for the past four years, helping them refine their research questions, manage projects, and present findings for publication. The reason he got involved was much more personal, though. Growing up in Lebanon, Challita faced similar struggles as some of these high school students. “I thought that frugal science “We’re trying to create the next would democratize science for generation of scientists, and we’re people who have the talent and going to cultivate their ideas into products, and students into inventors drive, but who face the burden of not having money,” he said. “So, I and authors.” - Saad Bhamla (named wanted to be more involved because a 2023 Newsweek “Great Disrupter” it would also allow me to give back for his Frugal Science work) to the community.” Graduate assistant Rajas intended for college students, her Poorna had a similar experience high school students wanted to growing up in India and joined NIH Grant Awarded compete in the synthetic biology the Bhamla Lab to help, but also competition and reached out to Now, with a new five-year believes frugal science makes him a Bhamla to use his open-source grant from the National Institutes stronger researcher. centrifuge to separate liquids using of Health (NIH), Bhamla and “As moved as I am by the centrifugal force. Standeven will pave the way to humanitarian aspect of this, what bring frugal science to high schools excites the physicist in me is that across Georgia. Standeven is now Students Publish Research enforcing ‘frugal constraints’ actuthe program director of ChBE’s Using a 3D printer, the team ally makes it easier to find elegant, Frugal Science Academy. created a centrifuge for molecular simple mechanisms that solve the Bhamla and Standeven first biology research and won a gold problem, regardless of cost,” he said. 2 SCHOOL OF CHEMICAL AND BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING, GEORGIA TECH In 2017, Gaurav Byagathvalli, a Lambert High School junior, reached out to ChBE Assistant Professor Saad Bhamla. They had worked together as part of Lambert’s synthetic biology program led by teacher Janet Standeven. Byagathvalli wanted to transform E. coli with engineered plasmids for an experiment and needed to use electroporation. Rather than purchase a $10,000 electroporator, the team brainstormed ideas to build a frugal version. With some ingenuity, a barbecue lighter became an electroporator and cost less than a dollar, enabling frugal cell transformations. More innovations like this exist in Bhamla’s lab: an automated tracking microscope for STEM, a 3D-printed centrifuge, and an inexpensive cell lysis device for molecular biology. These inventions aren’t just fun challenges — they’re also part of frugal science research between Georgia Tech and Lambert High School. Creating accessible, affordable equipment to democratize research is the foundation of frugal science.
started working together six years ago through her leadership of Lambert’s International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) team. Although typically
