Science Study Author? Fresh From High School
Pat Brennan, The OC Register
An Orange County man is co-author of a new UC Irvine study that offers precision analysis of smoke plumes from tropical burning — a feat in itself, because he began the work as a 17-year-old high school student.
Alex Krolewski, now a 19-year-old freshman at Harvard University, says he simply thought it would be “cool” to do some scientific research while in his junior year at University High School in Irvine.
So, after combing through departmental web pages at UCI, he sent an email to Charlie Zender, an Earth System Science professor who specializes in the intricate physics of Earth’s atmosphere and climate.
“I didn’t know him from Adam,” Zender said. “He sent me an email that said, ‘I’m a junior at University High School, and I have free time this summer. I’d like to spend it doing a research internship with you.’ I was a little dubious.”
But Zender met with Krolewski. Zender remembers him wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt, and though Krolewski’s memory is different, he said he was playing high school baseball that summer.
The professor said he was impressed that “nothing fased” the 17-year-old, even as Zender described the complex programming and technical rigor that would be required.
Two years later, Zender and Krolewski are co-authors of a study that breaks new ground: analyzing the shape, dimensions and reflectivity of smoke plumes from forest burning in Indonesia in a way that should allow precision forecasts of pollution and health effects downwind.
The research helped Krolewski get into Harvard, he and Zender said. The study was published last week in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Krolewski took a few minutes during a busy day at Harvard to talk about his first experience as a published scientific author.
Q. How did you come to do research with Charlie Zender?
A. After my junior year in high school, I thought it would be cool to do some research over the summer. I live right near UCI — my dad is at the medical school. I looked through departmental web sites and saw Charlie’s stuff. It looked interesting. I sent him an email and he said, ‘Yeah, sure, why don’t you come in,’ and we met.
Q. Did you come up with the idea for the project?
A. No, that was Charlie. He pointed me towards the fire-plume thing.
Q. Charlie said he talked about how difficult the research would be.
A. Essentially he said that I would have to learn the programming language, NCAR command language. It wasn’t too bad, because I’d done a little bit of programming before. I had all of (a previous graduate student’s) code to work off of. Largely what I was doing was writing out a code for data analysis.
Q. Did you know early on that you liked math and science, and wanted to do some research?
A. I’d liked it a lot in school. I liked reading about it on my own. I thought it would be great if I could do some research in high school.
Q. At your first meeting with him, he seems to remember you wearing a baseball cap.
A. I don’t think so, (but) I’m a Red Sox fan, and I was playing high school baseball in the summer. I was working around that.
Q. How did you manage to talk Charlie Zender into doing research with you? Not many high school students are doing research at this level.
A. Part of it is that I already had some programming background. That helped, and the fact I guess that I’d taken advanced classes; I’d taken physics in my junior year. The fact that I’d done some programming before made it much easier to pick up in terms of what we were doing — data manipulation. It allowed me to get a lot more out of it quickly, as opposed to spending a lot of time learning exactly how to write programs.
Q. How would you describe the main significance of your paper on smoke plumes?
A. We’re looking at the shapes of these plumes to try to estimate their ages, associated with wind speed. We looked at various optical properties — transparency, reflectivity — and we looked at how these properties changed as we went down the plume, away from the source, toward the end of the plume. And we tried to characterize the width of the plume. Things like that.
Q. Is the main usefulness of this work to help model pollution and health effects?
A. One effect would be pollution, kind of the evolution of these plumes into larger-scale clouds, or like smog. We’re looking at aerosols, then also the effects of these plumes and the associated clouds, which is just a conglomeration of these plumes — essentially the effects of smog on regional climate.
Q. You so far haven’t declared a major, but are interested in physics and astrophysics. What is pulling you in that direction?
A. Right now I’m taking an astrophysics course that I find very interesting. So that’s been great. Also there’s a lot of stuff in physics that is very interesting to me. I think getting a degree in physics. . .a lot of fields of science are open to you. So I could do something with particle physics, astrophysics, or climate modeling. It’s all basically a lot of options open.
Q. Any advice for high school students who want to do scientific research?
A. I have two things to say. As a more, longer-term thing, learning a program is great. It is very useful. It is a great skill. I would definitely do that. If you want to do research, a lot of stuff that is really happening really requires you to have a good understanding of programming. And in more of a short-term sense, don’t be afraid to send people emails. Eventually, somebody usually responds, if you send enough emails. If you’re interested in their stuff, and you push hard enough, it should be do-able.
Q. And how’s Harvard?
A. It’s been awesome. It’s my freshman spring. (I’ve been here) about seven or eight months. I’m living on campus. It’s great; it’s a lot of fun.
