Conestoga High Student Claims Science Fair Gold With MRI Robotics

TREDYFFRIN TOWNSHIP, PA — A Conestoga High School student is a gold medalist in the 2021 Delaware Valley Science Fairs for an invention that he said began with inspiration from the book "The Way Things Work."

Leo Wylonis, an 11th-grader at CHS, claimed gold for the project titled, "Novel MRI Compatible Dielectric Pneumatic Servo Motor."

"Ever since I read the book 'The Way Things Work' by David Macaulay as a little kid, I’ve been building and inventing. I approach the science fair as more of an 'inventing and engineering fair.' I'm intrigued by inventing something new," Wylonis said.

He said there was no "ah-ha" moment, but instead, he worked with "a long series of ideas and adaptations led me to my project," one that involved the development of a novel fully MRI compatible dielectric pneumatic servo motor for MRI-guided surgical robotics.

"Some of my best ideas have come from combining existing technologies in new and even seemingly crazy ways. For example, my motor design is a combination of Nicola Tesla’s tesla turbine in micro-plastic form, a soft robot as a brake subsystem and a plastic wheel as an optical encoder subsystem," Wylonis explained.

"Who would ever think these concepts could work well together?" he added.

Alone, each technology is known and pre-existing; when mashed together, they form a novel and inventive purpose, according to the young inventor.

"Sometimes the potential of an idea dead ends. But if I persist and keep combining, like in the case of my dielectric motor project, the road of possibility keeps rolling out in front of me. My inventing, research and experiments convinced me that a better MRI-compatible motor was possible and could be an amazing tool that would help a lot of people," he said.

He said that failure and mistakes were also part of eventually developing his successful project.

"My first gelatin phantom to demonstrate my dialectic robot grew so much mold that it practically walked away, all because I left it out of the refrigerator for a few days. You never know what you are going to learn along the way!"

The Delaware Valley Science Fairs exist for the purpose of stimulating interest in inquiry-based
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) among middle-school and high-school students.

Each year, 900 to 1,000 students in grades 6-12 from Pennsylvania, Southern New Jersey, and Delaware make new discoveries that could change their lives forever as they participate in the Delaware Valley Science Fairs. Nearly $6 million in scholarship and prize money is awarded to student winners, according to the organization's website.

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