Seniors in Chemical Engineering 437 last winter didn’t know what to expect when fictitious “Seattle Labs” hired them to extract proteins from egg whites using the 30-year-old Karr Column in the basement of Benson Hall.
A mysterious entity known as “Management” asked the students to isolate lysozyme, an enzyme that attacks bacteria and has applications in the pharmaceutical and food industries. Companies use the versatile protein to strengthen or preserve products such as throat lozenges, eye drops, baby formula and gourmet cheese.
Rather than follow a scripted routine using trustworthy data gathered beforehand by their instructors, students were given a single goal and no clear set of instructions.
If the project sounds especially challenging to undergraduates with no experience in industry, not to worry. Lilo Pozzo, an assistant professor, and Marvi Matos, a lecturer who joined the department in 2008, planned it that way.
The pair of innovators redesigned the “Chemical Engineering Laboratory II” module to better prepare seniors for the uncertainty that awaits them in their first projects outside the UW.
Chemical engineers in the 20th century turned petroleum into fuels and plastics, designed artificial organs, improved antibiotics, invented countless household products and laid the foundation for many modern industrial processes.
In the 21st century, chemical engineers will play a key role in the development of nanoscience, biotechnology and other rapidly evolving fields.
The pace of this evolution places a burden on educators like Pozzo and Matos, who must train students to deal with increasingly complex challenges.
“In traditional modules, the students are given a clear set of objectives and reference materials to accomplish their task in a short period of time,” Matos said. “In this experiment the students are presented with a variety of options for material compositions, limited availability of resources, and no clear short-term goals. The module is truly open-ended.”
In order to complete the project, the students broke into teams and separated the process into three distinct phases, each phase taking three weeks to complete. Each team gathered data and produced reports that future teams would need to complete the project on time.
“Students were not given a very well-defined problem. In fact, they were just given a big picture goal, to isolate the proteins, that didn’t give them time to meet on their own,” Pozzo said. “They had to identify smaller, achievable problems to solve before the class as a whole could meet the big picture goal.”
The first teams explored and documented the optimal conditions that future teams would need to isolate lysozyme using the Karr Column. “Management” provided a few articles to jumpstart their research, but Pozzo and Matos tried to stay hands-off.
“The instructors served as consultants,” Matos said. “Students were encouraged to find their own voice and not to follow our suggestions if they believed they had a better solution. We were there to offer guidance and the materials they needed, and to evaluate their performance as individuals and teams.”
The second teams used the suggestions from the first teams to evaluate possible configurations of the Karr Column to produce an aqueous bi-phasic system. This system was a necessary condition for the third teams to successfully extract the lysozyme from the egg whites.
Finally, the third teams were tasked with using the data gathered by the first two teams to isolate lysozyme under a deadline using limited materials.
Relying on other teams to provide accurate data reminded senior Sarah Widder that what goes around, comes around. “Thinking about how we used the data we got from other teams definitely made me think about the information we gave to the next lab group,” Widder said. “I thought about what we would like to have known when starting the lab and tried to convey that information as clearly as possible for others.”
Carina “CJ” Mitchell, a senior in the class, said it “was difficult to know whose work to trust, especially because every team’s results were presented differently.”Mitchell said the biggest challenge was learning how to interact effectively with different personalities.
“Getting people on the same page can be challenging when everyone has a different approach and level of understanding, and particularly so when we are all quite busy with other difficult classes,” Mitchell said. “It’s also harder to pressure a teammate to contribute more when you don’t know how they’ll react.”
Senior Kyle Flotlin thinks the collaborative approach works best. “Too often, groups will split up tasks so that one person has the planning report, one person does the analysis, and one person writes the final report,” Flotlin said. “This is not the way to do things. You’re a team for a reason, and each member should put forth effort on every task. Working together in a group gets tasks done faster and at a higher quality.”
Matos, who noted that the Karr Column may be older than both her and Pozzo, said that future versions of the class may include using the same approach to model the extraction of radioactive materials in the remediation of nuclear wastes from the Hanford site in eastern Washington.
“The extraction process can fundamentally be designed the same way as for the isolation of lysozyme from egg white,” she said. ‘We would use materials that were similar to nuclear wastes, but obviously not the radioactive stuff.”
No matter how the class evolves in the coming years, Matos said she and Pozzo aim to “help students develop a set of ‘soft’ skills, such as leadership, composure under uncertainty, critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, time management and thinking ahead.”