ASU Tempe Symposium

I’m not gonna lie. I totally forgot to make this post. We’ve been working on putting together the poster for the ASU Tempe Symposium. Everyone of us made it to the conference! Go us. I think it was a good conference. The key speaker had a lot of specialized knowledge about FTIR, so that was super exciting. She’s actually been part of working on 3D FTIR! We talked to her a bit about it, and it turns out that while FTIR is really exciting, it’s much more complicated than we are probably capable of interpreting really well especially given that our samples are biological and there are so many ingredients that might be contributing to the different peaking. She suggested GCMS or gas chromatography mass spectrometry, so maybe that’s something that we’ll consider as we begin the experiment again over the summer with the longer time frame. If we do, then we’ll just have to make sure to co incubated a larger number of plastic disks as the samples are destroyed in GCMS. I would be excited to have some addition quantitative data. We also saw some former PC science students! They told us about the LEAP program which sounds like a great program for students interested in conducting research that don’t qualify for S-STEM or TRAIN. I’ll definitely keep it in mind. MNT was really neat this week. We looked at the membrane inside an egg which Totally didn’t look how I expected, and we got to see our nanoparticle silver solutions. The larger particles formed an almost iridescent looking film on the glass tube. Rho Pi won a ton of awards for their activities this last year. I’m excited about participating in our future activities. We have quite a few super interesting things on the calendar related to financial wellness.