Building tomorrow’s engineers from the molecule up

One of Melisa Punjani’s best memories of her time as a Summer Session pre-college student was designing and building her own solar panels.

“We took the lab work a step further when one of the brilliant future engineers in our class suggested trying chlorophyll as the photosensitive dye for the solar cell,” Punjani said. “Seeing our poorly extracted chlorophyll actually generate current was an incredibly thrilling moment.”

Punjani participated in Pathways in Molecular Engineering, part of the Summer Session’s pre-college programs offered through the College. The three-week long Immersion program provides undergraduate-level courses to rising tenth through twelfth graders from around the world, highlighting the University of Chicago's offerings from biotechnology to philosophy to creative writing.

In Pathways in Molecular Engineering, faculty from UChicago’s interdisciplinary Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering teach the basics of chemical and mechanical engineering, materials science, physics, nanotechnology and molecular modeling.

“The fact that the course wasn't confined to a traditional classroom environment, but instead offered hands-on experiences that demonstrated what engineering looks like in real life, was the key factor that attracted me all the way from Turkey,” Punjani said. “I also wanted the opportunity to get to know PME, an engineering program that has fascinated me for years with its incredible research and innovations.”

Teaching UChicago PME’s interdisciplinary mindset to future engineers helps students cross traditional academic boundaries in a wide range of areas, such as energy harvesting and storage, water purification, and designing electronic, biomedical, and mechanical devices.

“PME focuses on developing solutions to important technological problems, but to solve a challenging problem oftentimes requires a broad perspective and the expertise of many people,” said Senior Instructional Professor Xiaoying Liu, who helped design the program and serves as its primary instructor. “We're trying to get the young students exposed to that idea.”

Taught by UChicago PME professors with guest lectures by industry experts, the goal is to highlight how a background in molecular engineering can help students’ careers in or out of the lab. In addition to Liu, the Pathways in Molecular Engineering instructional team includes UChicago PME Prof. Aaron Esser-Kahn, Assoc. Prof. Shrayesh Patel, Research Computing Center Senior Computational Scientist Trung Nguyen, and Senior Instructional Professors Mustafa Guler and Mark Stoykovich.

“Understanding engineering principles early in one’s life journey helps inform not just your educational outcomes, but also your long-term goals,” Esser-Kahn said.

Sustainability focus

When first envisioning the course in 2018, Liu and her colleagues decided to build the course around a well-defined topic that was both one of the world’s highest priorities and something the younger generation already cares deeply about. That is energy and sustainability.

“We take that as a vehicle to teach all the engineering skills that are involved in problem formulation and problem solving,” Liu said. “We use this framework to introduce to the students the fundamental principles of engineering design processes.”

The reception has been overwhelming and glowingly positive, said Summer Session Director of Academic Programs Stephanie Friedman. Like many of the College’s Summer Session pre-college courses for academically advanced high school students, Pathways in Molecular Engineering is often filled to capacity with a waitlist.

“Our pre-college course offerings are designed to show off what is most distinctive about the College curriculum. Pathways in Molecular Engineering is a great example of that,” Friedman said. “This course gives students the chance to explore the particular kind of engineering being pioneered at PME, which they could potentially engage as undergraduates here someday.”

Patel helped design the course in 2018 and has served as an instructor every summer since.

“The students come with varying degree of courses in high school science and math,” Patel said. “Some may have already taken chemistry, biology, and calculus, while some may have very minimal exposure. Tailoring a course to fit students with such a broad background is incredibly important to keep them engaged.”

Nguyen helped guide the students on modeling and arranged a tour of the RCC data center so students could see how supercomputers operate.

“In the computational lectures, we discussed how modeling and computation help us understand and predict the behaviors of materials from the atomic scale up,” Nguyen said. “It is very important for the students to know the fundamentals and the modern computational tools because – in combination of the knowledge gained from other components of the program – they will have a better sense of molecular engineering and realize how fascinating the field is.”

For the faculty instructors, the switch between working with UChicago PME’s PhD, Master of Engineering and undergraduate students to working with high school students is also a refreshing one.

“They ask a lot more questions, which is great,” Esser-Kahn said. “They also are less intimidated by faculty members.”

Industry partnerships

One of the most exciting aspects of the program is guest talks by industry representatives showing how the insights developed in the lab become the products that improve, shape and even save lives every day.

While many students may only think about lab work when considering their future, ChemQuest Vice President Sharon Feng spoke about the diverse, unexpected and fulfilling career paths a background in STEM enables.

“It is important that industry and academia work together to better prepare students with diverse skill sets beyond just knowledge acquisition that are essential for their successful career in the future,” Feng said.

Tage Carlson, Adrian P. Defante, Jayant Joshi, and Abe Janis from Hollister Incorporated spoke to the students about medical device development, showing how these products go from concept to market. It’s part of a longstanding industry-academia partnership between Hollister and PME, dating back to 2019.

“These interactions fulfill Hollister R&D’s need for broadened perspectives and PME’s goal to enhance learning with real-world experiences and industry exposure,” Janis said. “Our participation as guest speakers for the Summer Session high school program, as mentor-sponsors for the senior design capstone program, as judges for graduate research symposia, and as speakers at Industry Days offer repeated access for PME students to Hollister’s work to address chronic health conditions and our mission to make life more rewarding and dignified for our users.”

For Punjani, that combination of wide-ranging expertise and industry innovation made her summer at UChicago PME an unforgettable one.

“I’ve always been fascinated by math and physics, and I wanted to incorporate these skills and passions into my career trajectory,” she said. “This combination naturally led me to biomedical and molecular engineering as my primary career choices.”

• Learn more about Pathways in Molecular Engineering