Ebaa Al-Obeidi sees prickly pear in a way the rest of us don't.
We might see jelly. Or tweezers. Or a quick transplant.
The 17-year-old high school student sees energy.
The Canyon del Oro High School junior was a grand winner at the Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair for a project that studied the use of cactus in creating solar energy.
Roughly 1,400 student projects were displayed and judged in the fair, which wrapped up Friday at the Tucson Convention Center.
About 25 percent of the projects received awards, including certificates, monetary prizes, trophies and scholarships, but the really coveted prize is an all-expenses-paid trip to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, the world's largest science competition for high school students.
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That fair, which will be held in Reno, Nev., in May, will feature about 1,500 high school students from 40 countries.
Tucson High Magnet School student Angela Schlegel was the other individual grand-prize winner for her work with identifying plant enzymes, while Tucson High peers Emily Derks and Alice Glasser won for their team effort on urban stress on microbial communities in soil.
An eighth-grade observation team also attends the national fair, and this year the honors went to Ostin Zarse and Joshua Sloane, from the Sonoran Science Academy, for their research on increasing the output of photovoltaic cells.
Al-Obeidi, whose father is a chemist, was reading a scientific journal during her sophomore year when she learned about dye-sensitized solar cells, a viable alternative to the more commonly used silicon photovoltaic solar cells because they can be produced more quickly and inexpensively.
The cells, which commonly use pigment derived from blackberries, have some drawbacks in that they can degrade and lose efficiency in high temperatures.
So Al-Obeidi thought it might make sense to use a plant that has shown a distinctive capacity to thrive in lots of sun.
After harvesting cactus fruit, she used an oven and basic household materials to conduct experiments in a makeshift laboratory set up in her garage.
Although she is careful to say that it needs further exploration, her hypothesis seems to hold up. The voltage produced was lower, she said, but her project was able to sustain nearly stable power, while the blackberry control dipped over time. Her alternative also produced enough energy to run a small light bulb or a small fan, she said.
Randy Ryan, the assistant director of the University of Arizona's Agricultural Experiment Station and a judge for the competition, said he was impressed by Al-Obeidi's knowledge of quantum mechanics, saying it "would complement any graduate student's understanding."
"What really struck me about the project was her tenacity to continue the project and improve upon the research that she had read in a science article a couple of years ago," Ryan said. "To have a high school student with that level of intellectual curiosity is relatively rare."
He credited the project as a "novel concept that offers a lot of promise," although he cautioned that it's often hard to predict which projects will go on to be successful.
Al-Obeidi sees the Intel fair as an opportunity to network with other young scientists and experts.
"I know it sounds clichéd, but you have a chance to see what potential we have to change the world," she said. "You see kids who are really enthusiastic about what they're doing to improve the world, from creating alternative energy sources to curing tuberculosis or making rice crops more efficient."
She wants to work further to determine why ripe prickly pear fruits performed more effectively than green ones, and she'd like to continue improving the efficiency of the technology.
If that happens, she imagines the developing world could have more access to solar technology, because each of the 10 cells she produced costs less than $1.
"If we ever had to, I can see that we could just grow fields and fields of prickly pear," she said.
Besides, she jokes, she can see a better use for blackberries:
Eating them.
The winners
See a list of the awards given out Thursday and Friday nights here.
