The full title of Beaverton student Alexander Plekhanov’s Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair prize winning invention is a mouthful: Skew-Axis Cylinder Lens Optical System.
A student enrolled both at the Beaverton Academy of Science and Engineering and Portland Community College, Plekhanov invented and created the device with the help of a 3-D printer in his garage-turned-laboratory. It is intended to help optometrists better pinpoint the lenses needed to correct astigmatism, a common imperfection in the eye’s curvature that can make vision blurry and happens to run in Plekhanov’s family.
His lens system, Plekhanov says and the judges at the ISEF agreed, can diagnose the issue in a fraction of the time that the current bulky device through which we’ve all peered blearily at an eye chart, squinting through a series of different lenses, takes. His goal: To make it as simple as peering through a set of binoculars and putting them into focus.
To hear Alexander Plekhanov explain the science behind his prize-winning device, click here.
The invention earned Plekhanov a trip to Sweden in December to attend the Nobel Prize ceremonies and participate in the International Youth Science Seminar in Stockholm. He placed first in the “physics and astronomy” category of the fair and received a $5,000 prize.
But he’s not stopping there. Plekhanov, who is graduating next month at 16 and will matriculate at the California Institute of Technology this fall, says he is in the process of getting a patent for his optical system and wants to publish the results of his work in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.
“I also hope that I can actually drive it to full implementation and get this device into optometric offices,” he said. “And in fact, it doesn’t even have to be in optometric offices, because what I envision is that one could even just walk up to a kiosk at a pharmacy and get a vision self-check in a minute or two, without any appointment or long and tedious procedure. It would offer better accuracy and cost less too.”
Yes, he knows that carries echoes of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ thoroughly faked vision of a machine in pharmacies that with one drop of blood could screen patients for a multitude of diseases. The clear difference: “My device actually works,” says Plekhanov. “I have the results, I have the data. I’ve presented this to many specialists in the field and had them use my device on themselves for proof of concept.”
He’s been passionate about science for years, Plekhanov said, dating back to a third-grade science project during which he tested oil filters to prove his hypothesis that the most expensive products would work better than their cheaper counterparts. Turns out, he was incorrect, but no matter. He had been bitten by the science fair bug, and the methods were less problematic than his fourth-grade deep dive into whether putting tin foil into a microwave would improve its heating uniformity. It didn’t, but it did break the microwave.
“From a very young age, I had questions about a lot of things, and I just wanted to find a way to answer them,” he says. “Science was a venue for that.”
His father, an engineer, and his mother, an accountant, encouraged him all along the way, as did his sixth-grade science teacher at Stoller Middle School, Pamela Svenson, and his high school Advanced Placement physics teacher, Melissa Shell.
His life is not only about physics, of course. On the weekends — just for fun and to relax — Plekhanov and some friends are building a functional, two-seater airplane which he estimates will be ready for its first test flight in a month or so. And he’s an intern in the cardiometabolic lab at Oregon Health & Science University.
But his true love is physics, which he plans to study at Cal Tech.
“Physics really helps us to understand the very fundamentals of our world,” Plekhanov said. “The fact that we can really describe our world, and predict things, that really appeals to me.”
— Julia Silverman, @jrlsilverman, jsilverman@oregonian.com
