One of the summer’s big stories was the environmental crisis in Toledo, Ohio, where algae blooms in Lake Erie made the water supply undrinkable for several days. The problem is largely caused by the runoff of phosphorous-rich fertilizers used in modern agriculture. It’s an issue with which Menachem Tabanpour is intimately familiar: He has been studying phosphorous in wastewater ever since he was a student at James Madison HS in Brooklyn.

“Phosphorous is an essential nutrient in fertilizer that plants and crops need, but it can be more carefully used so it doesn’t end up in runoff,” he said.

Tabanpour, 28, is the president and co-founder of Nutrient Recovery & Upcycling LLC, a company that specializes in extracting phosphorus and other minerals from sewage and converting them into agricultural products. “We bring phosphorous back as a fertilizer but one that is concentrated and very targeted when it is applied close to the seed to avoid runoff,” he said.

As a research specialist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Tabanpour is also the principal researcher on a $450,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the extraction of phosphorus from wastewater.

I grew up in the Hasidic community in Crown Heights, where I attended yeshiva. When my parents divorced, my mother, my siblings and I left the Hasidic community for Flatbush where I attended public school. I was 13 years old when I entered 7th grade at Cunningham JHS. It took me a year to catch up in science and math since the yeshiva didn’t have a strong focus on those subjects. I barely had 5th-grade level competency in those subjects.

There wasn’t one specific thing that turned me on to science, but at home I was allowed to be curious. My maternal grandfather was a farmer who had training in mechanics, and he would bring me interesting books about flight or nature.

By the time I entered James Madison HS in 2000, I had high enough grades and confidence to enter the biomedical program.

One of my memorable teachers was William Dumont in chemistry. He posed a challenging project for me: Find out how wastewater treatment works. Before Mr. Dumont, I didn’t see things in terms of broader applications — how research applies to everyday life. I was naturally curious, but the best teachers provide context. Steven Kaye, another science teacher at Madison, did the same thing.

These teachers became sounding boards for ideas. The result was that when I started research, I knew how to look at every little thing and to brainstorm.

In Mr. Kaye’s class, we discussed research techniques and how lab research is conducted at the university level. With his encouragement, I won an internship when I was a sophomore in the NASA Summer High School Apprenticeship Research Program, where I interned for eight weeks at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

I initially wanted to work in the university’s physics department, but they put me in the soils department. About a week into the program, I called Mr. Kaye and told him I wanted to change labs. Instead, he encouraged me to stay in the soils department and gave me a lot of interesting topics I might want to explore, such as looking at Martian soil.

My conversation with Mr. Kaye gave me the courage to request my own project, and my advisor at Wisconsin agreed. I focused on phosphorous in water.

After I returned from the internship, during my junior and senior years of high school, Mr. Kaye helped me create a display board describing the research I did in Wisconsin on extracting minerals from wastewater, which I entered in New York City science fairs. I entered all the fairs: the American Chemical Society, the New York City Science and Engineering Fair and the Intel Science Fair.

I graduated a semester early from high school so that I could return to the University of Wisconsin and work on my research before attending college. As an undergraduate, I studied science and continued working on phosphorus recovery. After I graduated in 2009, I worked in various research positions until 2011, when one of my professors and one of his former doctoral students approached me with their idea to commercialize the research we had been working on. I had always wanted to start a business and accepted their offer to create Nutrient Recovery and Upcycling.

I don’t have a master’s or a Ph.D., but I manage our research projects with the skills I began learning in high school and fine-tuned throughout my undergraduate years. Being part of Mr. Kaye’s research class at James Madison HS pushed me in an incredible way and opened up a lot of opportunities for me.

— As told to reporter Linda Ocasio