Frugal Science Brings Research Opportunities to High Schoolers

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.

NIH Grant Awarded

Now, with a new five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bhamla and Standeven will pave the way to bring frugal science to high schools across Georgia. Standeven is now the program director of ChBE’s Frugal Science Academy.

Bhamla and Standeven first started working together six years ago through her leadership of Lambert’s International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) team. Although typically 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.

“We’re trying to create the next generation of scientists, and we’re going to cultivate their ideas into products, and students into inventors and authors.” - Saad Bhamla (named a 2023 Newsweek “Great Disrupter” for his Frugal Science work) intended for college students, her high school students wanted to compete in the synthetic biology competition and reached out to Bhamla to use his open-source centrifuge to separate liquids using centrifugal force.

Students Publish Research

Using a 3D printer, the team created a centrifuge for molecular biology research and won a gold

“I thought that frugal science would democratize science for people who have the talent and drive, but who face the burden of not having money,” he said. “So, I wanted to be more involved because it would also allow me to give back to the community.”

Graduate assistant Rajas Poorna had a similar experience growing up in India and joined the Bhamla Lab to help, but also believes frugal science makes him a stronger researcher.

“As moved as I am by the humanitarian aspect of this, what excites the physicist in me is that enforcing ‘frugal constraints’ actually makes it easier to find elegant, simple mechanisms that solve the problem, regardless of cost,” he said.