Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute

Blessed with many talents – both physical and academic – Highland Park High School’s Jacob Levinson joined the NanoExplorers program in the spring of 2004.

He consistently ranked among the Top 5 students in his class yet managed to work part-time, play football and compete in science and math contests. He studied Number Theory for Encryption at the University of Michigan and Superstring Theory at Brown. Combined with his keen interest in engineering, Jacob is a natural NanoExplorer.

Jacob assisted doctoral candidate Lee Hall in studies of materials with negative Poisson’s ratios – materials that expand laterally when stretched. He worked specifically on optimizing the mechanical properties of carbon nanotube sheets and on building and testing a digital image-acquisition system that could be used to measure the Poisson’s ratios of the sheets.

Jacob also helped characterize partially-oxidized (poly) acrylonitrile actuator materials, or PAN, a polymer used in many consumer products. It’s more commonly known as acrylic.

Using PAN films, he tested their tension properties and looked at the functional groups present in polymer samples with Attenuated Total Reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared spectroscopy. He reported on the transformation of the nitrile groups to carboxylic acid groups to help flesh out a possible recipe to partially oxidize acrylic without burning it.

The research could be used to one day build artificial muscles.

Jacob graduated 2 nd in his class at Highland Park High and was accepted to many prestigious universities. He started his undergraduate work in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) in fall 2005.