Week 9 Spring 2019: ASU SOLS Conference

So the poster has been printed and today we had our first mock presentation. Of course with  five team members it was not pretty but we will continue to practice up to the conference on Friday after noon. I have to say thanks to all my team mates, even though our poster format was not ideal you all made it look great. This picture is from our practice today, just an outline of how and who will present what. I'll let you all know how it goes next week!

Week 8 Spring 2019: Conference Season!!!!

Hey guys, hope everyone had a great spring break! We are in poster building mode this week. We have our first conference of the semester next Friday. We need to have our poster ready for print by noon tomorrow.  We just started to work on the poster Tuesday. Luckily we are a five person team now so I know we will get it done. Tomorrow we take the rest of our media controls to the FTIR and we get to take aeruginosa by itself to the fFTI as well.

Week 6 Spring 2019: Allergies are the worst

Mold!!!!!!! That is mold contamination on our plate along with something else around our plastic disk. We are still working out protocols and figuring out some background stuff with our FTIR analysis. We will be running analysis on our media tomorrow, should be very interesting considering one of our medias is a custom stock. Stay tuned!

Week 5 Spring 2019: Chemistry and Contamination

So today I we met with Dr. Wang to discuss our FTIR results from two weeks ago. I really need to become more familiar with chemistry because honestly the rest of our project is so chemistry heavy. The FTIR gives us amazing data and I am so excited that we can show quantitative data. The photo above are TSA plates that I streaked last week to test for contamination in our media only controls. Unfortunately our plastics 3 and 5 were contaminated. We are trying to figure out the best way to keep our plastics stored to deter contaminants. 

Week 4 Spring 2019: Hermanas

Last Friday was the Hermanas outreach and it went phenomenal. I was asked to speak and welcome the young ladies to campus. It was my first public speech to around 400 middle and high school girls. Needless to say I was nervous but excited. I'm so glad I did it and our workshops went well. Our first session was a little busy but other than that I think all the girls had a wonderful day of learning. 

Week 3 Sping 2019: Valentine's day

Today STEAM club participated in the Valentine's day Market. Unfortunately I could not stay till the end of sale but I had to make it to an important appointment for my son. Research this week has just been prep for coincubating our controls. We won't meet for research tomorrow due to our participation in the HERMANAS outreach tomorrow on campus. Next week I'll have some FTIR results to share, I'm sorry that last weeks blog image didn't workout.

Week 2 Spring 2019: FTIR For real

So last week I mentioned that we were going to work with the FTIR but unfortunately Professor Wang was unable to get into the system. We ended up setting up a work area with supplies while we can use when we are there every Friday. If everything goes right tomorrow we will be processing our winter break samples. This image is exactly what we are going to get or something very close. This read out was from last semester and it was ran using our home made micro plastics not our new disk samples.