Michael Bell has been awarded a 2013 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, based on “outstanding abilities and accomplishments as well as potential to contribute to strengthening the vitality of U.S. science and engineering.”
The $126,000 grant will pay living expenses and tuition at Harvard, where Bell is working on his Ph.D.
In being selected, the 23-year-old Palisadian was cited for his “independent thinking, creative and entrepreneurial application-oriented research,” as well as his “vision and energy for finding transformative applications for basic research with the savvy, skills and inventiveness in translating that vision into potentially market-changing intellectual property.”
“I’m working on 3D printing of functional materials for printed electronics and bio-related applications,” Bell told the Palisadian-Post on Monday. “My own goal is to print an entire electrical device, such as a cell phone, on a single machine. I am also currently engineering a 3D printer that will print cells and microvascular architectures with the goal of printing organs.”
Bell has also received the Pierce Fellowship, a prestigious award from Harvard given to a select few applicants at its School of Engineering and Applied Science.
Bell attended Los Angeles High Tech High School in Van Nuys (a charter school for the technically inclined) after the Renaissance Academy School in Pacific Palisades closed.
He received his undergraduate education from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana, with dual degrees in computer engineering and mechanical engineering.
As a college sophomore, he noticed that battery life on laptops was growing shorter and shorter, so he researched battery technology. After finding two manufacturers in China that could create prototypes, Bell tested them at the Rose-Hulman laboratories. They were successful, and Bell formed a company, Engineering Pixels, to sell the batteries. Within six months he had sold more than 2,000; his customers included Hewlett-Packard employees and the U.S. Air Force.
During the summer and winter of 2011, Bell tested and refined battery systems at the headquarters of Tesla Motors in Palo Alto, while attending Stanford University full time. Back at Rose-Hulman in the spring of 2012, Bell worked on his senior project, a robotic system project for National Instruments that identifies manufacturing errors.
Bell returned to Tesla again last summer in the battery technology department. “Their cars use the same batteries as those used in laptops,” he said. “Laptops have eight, cars 8,000.”
Bell’s mother, Andrea, is the owner of Chef’s Kitchens on Robertson Boulevard.
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