Noele enjoys singing in the Miami Children's Chorus and reading science fiction and fantasy books. She plans to become an aerospace engineer. "I love using space science and math to create new ideas and inventions," says Noele.
Her seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Soto, is her mentor, because "she opened my mind to the many different angles of science."
Noele became interested in dinoflagellates' bioluminescence from work she had done at a mariner summer program. She decided to study the relationship between intensity and duration of dinoflagellates' bioluminescence and different chemical and mechanical stimulations. She developed a project to determine how types of stimulation affect the emission of light from dinoflagellates, with the hope that this information would be useful in detecting pollution in the ocean.
Noele placed 70 small bottles of dinoflagellates in a darkened room and began a timed fluorescent lighting that gave them a balanced circadian rhythm. Using a variance of acetic acid dilutions for a chemical solution and a variance of shaking the bottle for mechanical stimulation, Noele established a total of 16 variables to be tested four times each. Each culture was stimulated under its particular variables, and she recorded the duration of the bioluminescence and the light intensity on a scale of 1-10. Noele concluded that the intensity of the light was a result of the mechanical stimulation: the harder she shook the bottles, the brighter the dinoflagellates glowed. She also determined that the duration of the bioluminescence was affected by the chemical solution. Noele conjectured that if chemicals or pollutants, or both chemicals and pollutants, create an effective equivalent to that of the acetic acid used in her experiment, then dinoflagellates may be useful in the detection of oceanic pollution.
