Thanks to a couple of innovative companies that have made Greene County part of their team, there is an electron microscope at West Greene High School for teens to cut their scientific teeth on, and a research and development company in Waynesburg that offers internships to graduates and undergraduates.
SDGroup on Rolling Meadows Road, Waynesburg, is doing its part to offer real time science, technology, engineering and mathematics opportunities to local students.
“The National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Health want to start engaging people in the sciences and start them young – it’s ‘giving back to education’,” SDGroup financial manager Judith Galbraith said. “Their Small Business Innovation and Research (SBIR) program grants have an educational component so this is our return on the government’s investment in us. SBIR funds interns from local colleges and universities and has match grants for schools with placement programs. We work with Waynesburg University and when we got our phase II funding it included salary for an undergraduate student for the summer. Everyone here lives in Greene County and we’ve had students both as interns and paid staff who used the Scanning Electron Microscopy Lab at West Greene.”
In 1998, RJ Lee Group, a Monroeville-based company with offices in Waynesburg that uses scientific methods and lab resources to pursue a broad variety of business ventures, wrote a Schoolhouse Project grant through the Appalachian Regional Commission to establish the SEM lab at the high school. Students learned to use the equipment, not only for grades but for after-school jobs processing data for projects the company was working on at the time.
“We’ve had a number of students who have won national awards here, then went on to a career in science and technology,” SEM lab instructor and adjunct professor at Waynesburg University Lurea Doody said. “I worked with RJ Lee when the lab was first implemented and they still give us the liquid nitrogen and other supplies we need to operate and maintain the equipment.”
“We knew we had some really great ideas and it made sense that we should see if we qualified for the government SBIR grants that were available. They are very competitive and winning one is like a seal of approval, which I think is more important than the money itself,” senior scientist Dr. David Walker said.
SDGroup won its first SBIR grant for a novel approach to delivering more oxygen to the combustion process. Research done by Argonne National Laboratories for the Department of Energy shows that increasing the oxygen content of air from its natural state of 21 percent to 24 percent “reduces particulate emissions from diesel engines by 60 percent, can increase power by 20 percent and decrease fuel consumption 18 percent,” company CEO and inventor Doug Galbraith said.
“We’re creating systems that make an enriched oxygen stream by separating the nitrogen. Separation happens all the time in industry. You see the big tanks filled with the adsorbents, using valves and compressors. It’s a big mechanical system that wears out, breaks down and, bottom line, uses a lot of power,” he said.
“Our process has few moving parts, has no minimum or maximum size and uses very little energy. Key to the success of our process is the new molecular sieve material we developed in conjunction with chemical manufacturer Arkema.” Galbraith said.
Three years ago, Walker and Galbraith were invited to volunteer their time to review new proposals from start-ups and universities across the nation that qualify for SBIR funding as small businesses with less than 500 employees. Of the many millions of federal dollars available for research, only 2.5 percent is set aside for the kind of innovation that comes from small start-up ventures with new great ideas.
“It was time to give something back,” Walker said. “We sit on two or three of these vetting panels a year. They send us proposals electronically and that gives us a chance to review them before we meet as a group to choose the projects we feel are viable and meet the criteria. Out of 10 to 20 proposals, two or three might be funded.”
Experts in science and industry, including retired business CEOs, research professors and patent attorneys who serve on these panels gather at NSF headquarters in Arlington, Va., for intensive one-to-two-day sessions to compare notes and make the recommendations that get passed on to the final decision makers at NSF. Those who receive funding show intellectual merit, broad impact and a novel scientific approach, not just a rework of existing ideas.
Walker and Galbraith are asked to consider proposals that suit their expertise: Water quality, material science and energy. The grants are for phase one and phase two proposals, up to $750,000 per grant, Galbraith said.
“Half the revenue in the United States comes from small businesses, so this governmental support is crucial when it comes to funding viable proposals in science and technology start-ups. We’re seeing so many new ideas, especially in the material sciences that will affect the way we live,” he said.
“We’re taxpayers so we’re looking for the positive societal and economic effect for the tax dollars being put in,” Galbraith said. “I look at it this way – the Minutemen helped create this nation. I see us as the scientific Minutemen – and women – who help maintain our economic security and well-being."
