Andrew Tran, a third-year chemical engineering student at Oregon State University, is driven by his desire to create a more sustainable future. Recently announced as a Goldwater Scholarship awardee, Tran is working on innovative solutions to reduce the amount of plastic waste in the environment.
“Sustainability is where I find most of my passion, because I want to feel good about what I'm doing,” Tran said. “l want to be able to make some sort of impact, to make things even just a little bit better.”
Early achievements
He’s not wasting any time. Still a year off from collecting his bachelor’s degree, he’s already secured a second-author credit on a refereed journal article and is contributing to another. After graduation, he plans to pursue a doctorate in chemical engineering at a top U.S. university.
In recognition of his accomplishments, Tran was awarded the Barry Goldwater Scholarship this spring. This prestigious award acknowledges and supports exceptional college sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, and engineering.
Tran, a Hillsboro native, didn’t have plastics in mind (or even a specific major) when he arrived at Oregon State to study engineering. He found direction in his first year through the URSA Engage program for undergraduate research. That’s where he connected with Lucas Ellis, assistant professor of chemical engineering, whose research focuses on materials and catalysis for applications that further environmental sustainability.
Ellis mentored Tran in his lab and invited him to stay on through the summer through the Pete and Rosalie Johnson Internship Program, which sponsors paid summer research positions for chemical engineering majors after their first year.
“After that, I just continued working in the lab, as sort of the resident undergraduate researcher,” Tran said.
Outside the lab, Tran is active in the Cambodian Student Association and the CBEE Club, and he works as a career assistant in the College of Engineering’s Career Center. Last summer, he completed an internship with Intel in Hillsboro and has been invited to return this year.
Current research and future goals
These days, Tran’s research involves performing kinetic experiments with a gas phase reactor to investigate plastic upcycling techniques. Unlike traditional plastic recycling – in which certain types of plastic can be melted down and reused a few times, until the material becomes degraded – the Ellis lab’s approach aims to dismantle the long molecular chains that plastics are made of.
“We want to break complex polymers down into smaller, simpler molecules that can then be used to build new plastics,” Tran said. “We do that through thermocatalysis. So, instead of just blasting polymers with a lot of energy at very high temperatures, we use a catalyst that enables depolymerization at much lower temperatures.”
The big-picture goal, Tran says, is to create a circular economy for plastics. When a product reaches the end of its useful life, its polymers can be reincarnated indefinitely, rather than being interred in a landfill or drifting out to sea.
“Instead of using lots of energy and other scarce resources to essentially manufacture 400 metric tons of trash every year, we can take trash and turn it into useful products,” Tran said. “The key concept for me, if I could put it into just one word, is circularity.”
