INPERSON
Buoyed by
Success
BY NICOLE TAFE
Pine-Richland Middle School’s Eve Mango
gains national attention with her drifting buoy science project.
W
hen entering a science fair, most students hope their science
project stands out among their peers, but for Pine-Richland
eighth-grader Eve Mango, standing out means gaining the
attention of a national science agency.
Eve, 13, is involved both at school and in extracurricular activities.
Her favorite course this year is Mrs. Cekella’s geometry class, and she
plays volleyball and runs track for the school. She is also in the math
club and the school’s orchestra. “One of my biggest mentors/role
models is Pine-Richland senior Arushi Bandi,” notes Eve. “She inspires
and influences a lot of things I do, and I aspire to be more like her
as I get older.” Outside of school, Eve also participates in an all-girls
robotics team at Carnegie Mellon University.
She engaged in an engineering project created for the Pittsburgh
Regional Science and Engineering Fair. Eve's gifted (GATE) teacher
at Pine-Richland, Mrs. Deal, told her about the fair in late September
and the young scientist was extremely interested. “I knew I wanted to
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enter the fair right away, but was not sure what topic to pursue or how
I would do so,” Eve says. “I began to notice tons of plastic water bottles
at sporting events, especially soccer tournaments that I attended, and
wondered where all the plastic went.”
She decided to track how far local plastic pollution can travel and
impact global waters. Uniquely, Eve decided to take a new approach
toward a solution for plastic waste control by targeting small creeks
and tributaries, rather than trying to collect the plastic once it reaches
major rivers and oceans.
Soon after, she read an article about climatologists in Japan who
were using “drifting buoys” to track where waste in the ocean goes
after a tsunami. She decided to contact Mr. Tsutsumi, the president of
the company in Japan that conducted the study, and asked for further
information on the buoy and if it was possible that she could attain one
of her own. “Mr. Tsutsumi generously offered to give me a $2,500 buoy
for free, and that’s when I decided I just had to do this project for the