“Insects are the little things that run the world, and if they disappear, life as we know it will change.” – E.O. Wilson

A Legacy of Research: Our team originated at Princeton High School, where we built demonstration gardens and saved three tons of waste from landfills. After schools reopened following the COVID-19 pandemic, a phenomenal group of students entered the classrooms and unused school grounds at PHS and initiated a transformation based on excellence and academic rigor.

Mayda Jiguan (pictured above) was instrumental in starting the black soldier fly project that became our bid in the 2022 Samsung Solve for Tomorrow STEM competition, and she appears in the Finalist entry video that can be viewed here. You might also notice that she is fluent in the Mayan Mam language, which was the project that won a national grand prize in 2024. Her presentation on a robot that can communicate in Mam can be viewed here. In a followup to this win, Mayda and two other Mam language speakers were interviewed with Che’w, the robot that communicates in this indigenous language, and the New Jersey Spotlight video can be viewed here. Mayda has also been recognized for her academic achievements by the Everest Education Foundation with a 5D Scholarship.

Yurai Gutierrez Morales (pictured above) was also heavily involved in the “behind the scenes” work that was necessary to maintain our black soldier fly colony and win both Solve for Tomorrow and the New Jersey Climate Challenge. She then went on to even greater academic achievement by becoming a Top 40 Finalist in the Regeneron Science Talent Search after having studied plant-eating spiders that live in Mexico and Central America.

While teaching at various grade levels throughout his career, Mark Eastburn (along with Bevan Jones) helped elementary school students recognize the bog turtle as New Jersey’s official state reptile in 2018. In fact, this bill was the first that former Governor Phil Murphy signed into law. In addition to teaching biology, chemistry, and environmental science, Mark Eastburn was a co-teacher in the award-winning Princeton High School Research Program. Though it was painful for him to leave Princeton High School and the community where he had worked for nearly 25 years, it was this opportunity to collaborate on Illucens Solutions that has been a way to connect the global perspective that he gained from his prior service in the United States Peace Corps with a sustainable solution to the planet’s food waste crisis and mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. It was only because of the strong commitments from his former students that Mark has chosen to collaborate and move this project forward with all of his energy.