Whiz Kid of the Week: Sona Dolasia

When the 2010-2011 school year ends in three weeks, Sona Dolasia will head off to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she’ll learn about bacteria and microbial fuel cells from microbiologists Derek Lovley and Ashley Franks and get to test her own ideas.

Dolasia isn’t a senior getting ready to head off to college.

She’s 11 years old.

Dolasia, a sixth grader, recently won a national Kids’ Science Challenge competition, which was created by Jim Metzner, producer of the Pulse of the Planet radio series, and is funded by the National Science Foundation. Her upcoming research work with Lovley and his colleagues is part of her prize.

The competition asks kids the chance to submit their ideas for a problem or experiment they'd like to work on with the program’s participating scientists. Winners get to actually work on those problems with the scientists, along with other prizes.

Dolasia was one of three winners from among more than 1,300 third-through-sixth grade students who submitted ideas for the challenge.

“Sona is a wonderful learner,” says Erica Kaplan, a science teacher at Mill Valley Middle. “She learns for the sake of improving herself and those around her. She is respectful, patient, and kind. She has a keen intellectual curiosity and is an exemplary role model for her peers.”

Dolasia entered in the "Magical Microbes" category. Her submission asked if certain kinds of microbes called lithotrophs, which eat salts in stones and rocks, could be used to eat salts in the ocean and be a faster, cheaper way to desalinate ocean water to make more drinking water. The entry sought new ways to use microorganisms for human benefit.

"Sona’s idea was quite novel and had the potential to have a global impact if it were to work," says Franks, director of K-12 outreach for Lovley’s Geobacter Project laboratory at UMass Amherst. "We thought Sona’s proposal was particularly impressive because she recognizes that access to clean water is becoming a health and sustainability crisis for so many people around the world."

Dolasia and the other winners will be featured on Pulse of the Planet’s broadcasts and podcasts on pulseplanet.com.

When she arrives at Umass Amherst in June, Dolasia will visit the Geobacter Project, as well as touring other science labs on campus.

"We’ll go out to Puffer’s Pond with Sona and pick up a bucket of mud, come back to the lab and create a microbial fuel cell with her, as we have done for our own experiments, to show her how naturally occurring bacteria can be beneficial to us,” Franks says. "We’ll show her how Geobacter can be used to clean uranium out of water, how it can be used to produce electricity on the sea bottom in sea water, and how it can help to clean up toxic waste such as petroleum products found at the bottom of harbors and from oil spills in the ocean, lakes and streams."