West Ranch High School senior Owen Hess had the summer of a lifetime after he attended the seven-week Anthony L. Clark Scholars program at Texas Tech University.
Hess decided to study neuroscience, physics, biology, and material science in the physics department during the program, which started in late June and ran until early August.
He titled the project, “Voltage-Stimulated Electromechanical Coupling Enables Memcapacitive Behavior in Lipid Bilayers.”
“The basic idea behind what I said was, if a cell membrane itself can remember something about what it previously experienced, and I did this on a (1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine) bilayer, which is commonly found in cell membranes, the type of fossil lipid that makes up the membrane. And I was studying what happened to the membrane previously and how its current state depended on that. And that’s what mem capacity behavior is,” Hess said about his project.
Hess used an example of a sponge and what happens when someone squeezes it; it can go back to a certain shape, but that it depends on how someone squeezes it.
“Like, it might have your fingerprints … in the sponge still. So, I was looking at how the lifted membrane responded electrically. And I was also seeing how this kind of ties into memory,” Hess added.
Hess said that he was one of 12 students who were accepted from 1,000 applications into the program and felt grateful he was able to experience it.
When asked what he learned about himself throughout the process, Hess said he enjoyed learning new skills that he could apply in the future.
“I definitely enjoyed meeting the people, but then … I learned Java and Linux, computational modeling, and things like that. So, I definitely hope to apply those skills, maybe at future science fairs, or at another lab, or something like that,” Hess said.
