Last fall, 15-year-old Jonny Cohen had the swine flu. His mom Jakee noticed the soup supply was low and ran to the neighborhood deli to restock. When she arrived back at her Highland Park home 20 minutes later, the garage door was open and Jonny was happily dismantling his sister’s Barbie dolls and packing them with gun powder to see how much was necessary to get the job done.

“It was all powered with a battery operated remote and he was wearing goggles, so…Basically, nothing is safe in the house and I decided to embrace that a long time ago,” says Mrs. Cohen. Luckily, Jonny’s scientific experiments are usually dedicated to more noble pursuits. The Highland Park High School sophomore has been making headlines with a project he first thought up when he was a 7th grader—GreenShields. The concept, explains Jonny Cohen, is pretty simple.

“I came up with the idea after taking a summer course at Northwestern on the basic principles of aerodynamics. In class we built air-pumped dragsters and I started thinking about ways to make everything more aerodynamic. One day later that year I saw a school bus and the idea just sorta just hit me,” he says.
The idea is to change the stair-step shape of a traditional school bus—a clunky design that slows down the bus, making it necessary to use more fuel to run—by installing a piece of Plexiglas to the front of the bus that would, essentially, reshape the bus from step to slide, significantly reducing drag and improving fuel efficiency. 

Being a seventh grader, Jonny didn’t have access to the money or resources to test his idea. But his mom Jakee, who along with her husband Brad, have spent the last 14 years encouraging her son’s scientific interest—and picking up pieces of disassembled phones, Bluetooth headsets and toasters—contacted the high school, where her daughter Azza is a student, to see if anyone could help him out.

“I went to talk to Mrs. Bain (Shannon Bain head of the Highland Park High School science department) and she told me about the Lorax competition and we entered,” Jonny says. In 2008, he won a $1,000 grant to attend the 2009 Youth Venture Summit at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and work on getting GreenShields on the road.

The seed money allowed Jonny to construct a rough prototype but not to conduct all of the necessary testing—never discouraged, he assembled a team, including his older sister Azza and a number of her friends, to enter the Pepsi Refresh Project. Open to anyone with a  good idea, Pepsi accepts 1,000 potentially world-altering ideas a month, people vote and winners receive funding. Jonny and his team got $25,000 last winter—and he has since been featured in a Pepsi commercial, on Good Morning America and MTV.

Once he had the money, he needed a lab. Jonny had been attending classes at Northwestern University’s Talent Development Center for a number of years and it seemed like a good place to start looking for help. Stacy Benjamin, senior design engineer and professor at Northwestern Engineering’s Segal Design Department had met Jonny a few years earlier when he developed a cheese-shooting gun for burgers in one of her courses.

“After he got the grant he sent her an email. It is just a great example of everything coming full circle. I feel like this gift dropped down from heavens,” Jakee says.

Benjamin decided to run the project in the summer so Jonny could be involved. She and two interns are joining him; she was attracted to the project for a number of reasons. “We try to stay connected to the community and if someone comes to us with an idea and we can fit in a project, we like to. With this, our students get to explore an interesting engineering challenge, it helps the community and could really be a good solution so there was no downside to trying,” she says.

The team is currently working with computer models and looking into issues around drag on large vehicles—including buses and semi trucks—and at the shield itself. There are visibility issues to consider as well as regulations surrounding windshield wipers and retrofitting a vehicle. Later this summer the team plans to get a bus and start test driving. And while one of Jonny’s many summer activities is a driver’s ed class, he won’t be the one behind the wheel.

Right now, he is just enjoying watching the project progress. “I want to be an aerospace engineer, that’s my dream profession, I’ve always had that dream. This is a really fun project and I get to be involved every step of the way, I love watching it grow from my dream into a reality.”