Week 10 Final Post-PK

YAY!~ wow... it's I can't believe summer is over and my EXP experience comes to close. So sad, but it was extremely fun, interesting, and overall, great! 

I assume I won't be going back to the lab regularly, but I still have to analyze the data and come up with a conclusion. I actually had to go back to the lab for one extra day to get the software to analyze the data. I expect I will be going back so that Teuta can help me with my conclusion.

So ever since the last day, I could never tell whether Teuta actually like me or not... I guess that's something I shouldn't be writing. Well, whatever. On the planned last day, I brought in bubble tea to the lab right after lunch. Everyone minus my PI, Josh, wanted one (apparently they like it more than doughnuts)! Then Teuta said something along these lines: Preston, you can come back again! You're very useful... and you bring nice treats!~

LOLOL after working in the lab for over 400 hours, all I'm good for is bringing the lab treats. Hahahaa

jkjk Teuta has complimented me quite a few times over the past two years. It's just that the way she said that was funny. 

Well, I doubt I'm gonna spend 3 summers working in Dr. Joshua Shaevitz's lab, so I'd like to thank him so much. Not many would take a short, pimply sophomore kid in their lab for two summers. He and Teuta really made a huge difference to my experience. Also, I'd like to thank Teuta and the other members of the Shaevitz group. The environment was extremely pleasant and I had a great time working with and next to all of them. Once again, I'd like thank them all SOOOOOoooooo much for making my past two summers a great experience. 

Wait... I don't think any of them are going to read this... whatever~

Anyways, this is my last post (if you didn't get the hint from the title), and I'd just like to say EXP was expecially awesome!

Peace!~

-PK

Week 9 Post 2 -PK

Lahh only 3 more days!~ I'm so excited yet sad. I'm excited because I'm almost done with all of my trials. I'm sad because, well I'm almost done working in Shaevitz's lab. Hahahaaa I mixed feelings seem very weird when explaining them.

So everything I've done up till now essentially was just gathering data. I haven't had any time to analyze it really. I did a little bit in July I think, but while I'm in school. I have to do that. So I still have yet to download the software for analyzing and plotting the data. That always seems like it's a problem huh? The truth is I'm technically not supposed to get ANY software since all of it belongs to Princeton and I'm not a student. As I mentioned in a previous post, I am a "visitor". If I didn't make it clear in my other post, I'm very sad. I get the same status of a 1-day visitor despite working in a lab for 10 weeks, walking in and out of signs that say "restricted access" (or something like that), and walking through doors that require a swipe of a key card! Plus, when I buy food from the campus center, I get charged tax :'(
So coming back from my digression, I will be getting the program I use for analyzing the data on Monday. On  Tuesday, I learn how to use it. On Wednesday, I use it a bit and ask Teuta a lot of questions. Then for the next month, I'm supposed to plot, analyze, and interpret the data all by myself. Hopefully I'll be able to come to the lab during some days in September to get help, but the vast majority of it is going to be done by myself. Truthfully, this is going to be a huge challenge for me. One because I don't know statistics very well. Two, I don't know biology very well, so I may not have the best interpretations. Three, essentially I have to teach myself this program. Four, I have a bunch of other stuff going on in September that I'm supposed to do.

But so far, I think I'm going to be getting enough data to be meaningful. Data is data, but meaningful data is better. We'll see. Only 3 days left and nothing major broken. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, but we'll see.

Oh and apparently someone in the lab is working with Cholera so now whenever he's in the lab, I have to wear a lab coat. No one else does... just me :(

Peace~

-PK

Week 9 Post 1 -PK

OMGSH!~ I only have 1.5 weeks (ish) left! Overall the experience was pretty cool, but there are so many things I still want/need to do! Largh, why is there ALWAYS too little time? Well I guess part of the reason is that I'm limited by the number of trials I can do each day. Since I have to grow the E. coli that day, I can only run two trials, regardless of how fast I am at running the actual experiment. Pity...


So I just got back from my two week Bible camp retreat and I was told that once again, I am going to be doing a slightly different experiment. I still am studying the effects of osmotic shocks on the same strains of bacteria; however, I am going to be looking at a different mechanism the E. coli employ when coping with the osmotic shock. The first mechanism I studied was that certain pumps transferred materials (it depends on which pump one is looking at) in and out of the cell. The mechanism I am beginning to study now is the synthesis of materials, one of which is trehalose.


This is going to be pretty awesome, but there are two downsides of this. One, I don't get as much data on the first mechanism as I would be able to if I concentrated all my efforts on the first mechanism. Two, I have to read a lot more primary articles. It's not really that I mind the second one, but I'd really like to keep my brain fresh for the Peddie homework and college apps I do at night. (Yeah... I've been procrastinating a lot lately :( )


I can't wait for the next two weeks to come. Not just because I'm done, but I finally will feel like I accomplished a lot. Hopefully, it won't end and I'll be able to come to the lab during the school year. I don't know how that'll work out, but I got my fingers crossed that it does.


Peace~


PK

Last Entry (Rotimi Opeke)

I'm home now.

I just finished my lab work on Friday and I was able to pull some 3D images of the surfaces I looked at under the microscope. Have a look.

Now that I'm in Nigeria I will finish up the lab report and my paper as a whole. In terms of applied uses and a better understanding of what exactly an "active layer" looks like, check out the link to this article. The "active layer" is the highly transparent film that is on the piece of glass that the hand is holding.

Ala Viva and thanks for reading

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/11/photovoltaic-polarizers-could-make-self-charging-smartphone-drea/

Sleep is for the weak (Rotimi Opeke Week 7?)

Hey guys!

This is my last week! I can't describe how happy I am to be finishing up this week and heading back home to Nigeria. All though I have lots of work to do when I get back home (college applications, Convocation speech, summer homework and SAT prep), I'll finally be reunited with family....but until then....

This week I have finally started the analysis. For 10 hours on  Monday, I prepared my own organic solar devices for the first time and was able to perform electrical characteristics (I finished it all before midnight!). My devices worked perfectly and gave me the data that I need, so I am really proud of that and it makes my job in analysis a lot easier. Although the graphic extensions in Excel leave much to be desired, I can get enough from the program to analyze my results fully (Power Conversion Efficiencies, Fill Factor, etc.)

Today was my morphology testing and it was a much shorter day. I prepared my mini-samples for the AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) in the advanced instrument building and have been measuring the surface geography of these samples for the past 2 hours. The scanning is really slow and takes about 15 minutes for each image, but I don't mind staying a bit later to get all of my work out of the way.

Tomorrow looks like it is going to a day full of teaching as I need to pass on my knowledge to a visiting researcher before I leave the US on Saturday. Because I developed all of my methods by myself and have used very little help from established literature, I need to pass on my knowledge to another person in the lab to continue as I prepare to go back to school.

Ala Viva.

Week 8 Post 1 --PK

It's great to be back in the lab!... well sort of. I definitely don't miss the delectable aroma of E. coli. But it's nice to work with awesome equipment and know that you're doing something actually productive and brand new.

So, after my break from the lab, I returned today to find out that the next three weeks are going to be extremely  busy for me. So basically I have been running one 3+ hour experiment every day. I've done that for three different E. coli strains for different magnitudes of osmotic shocks. Now, I have to run 6-9 20 minute experiments AND the one 3+ hour experiment every day. It's a lot harder to increase my output by 600-900%! However, it should definitely  be worthwhile since I'll be able to collect a ton of data.

Sadly, I only ran one experiment today. :( This was due to technical difficulties with the optical trap. It took more than two hours to fix and recalibrate. Also, I made a few errors in the slides I prepared. Good thing I have 3 more weeks to practice.

Also, I finally got the installation CDs for a program I need to analyze the data. So hopefully, I won't be needing to analyze everything in Matlab. Matlab is really convenient for data in matrices, but it's a bit tedious and annoying to put the data into the correct format and laying it out as graphs or other such things. The program I will be using is called Labview. I'm pretty sure I won't need to learn another programming language, which is a bit nice. So towards the end of August, I'll be analyzing data while running experiments. So I'll be SUPER busy. Can't wait... seriously.

Also, I'm very happy to say that so far, I haven't broken anything despite the fact that I am constantly rushing around trying to get the timing of my experiment perfect. The problem is that timing the growth of E. coli is hard since they are living organisms and grow at slightly different rates (even if they part of the same colony and strain).

Can't wait to finish! I'll try to keep you, the general public, updated on my most current activities, but it might be hard since I literally will be working 9.5 hours a day with only a 30 minute break for lunch. :( I like breaks.

Peace~

-PK

6th Week (Rotimi Opeke)

14 days left.

We'll its me, myself and I in the lab now, going lone ranger and finishing my project while most people are finishing their overseas project. I leave on August 6 so the time to buckle down is really here and my opportunity to completely finish has presented itself. I plan to get the morphology part of my experiment finished this Friday as I selfishly and expensively booked the AFM microscope for the whole day. On the other hand, I plan to finish the electrical characterization part of my experiment early next week (Monday or Tuesday). All I have to do is have the solar devices ready so that the guys in Electrical Engineering can thermally evaporate aluminum to act as my cell's second cathode.

This doesn't sound like much, but along with the 4 hour long SAT classes I'm attending in the morning, it seems like I have little time to do all that I need to do. It's been to bed early and up early for the past few days and I don't expect things to change until I leave for Nigeria.

However, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Rotimi Opeke

Final Post- GR

On Wednesday of my last week, I was able to perform the first step of the synthesis.  I was not able to see this step when I first started because the first two-steps were already performed on the sample that we were working on, but it turned out that more starting material was needed so it worked out that I was able to see all of the steps but the second.  On Thursday and Friday, we continued synthesizing and purifying the final product. It was a productive and busy week.

I am definitely going to miss everything about my time at the lab (except the commute, of course).  I had a fantastic time and was able to meet some great people.  I feel that one of the best things about it was that I was able to be in a professional environment while still learning as much as I would be while in a classroom.  Thanks so much to everyone who was involved!  Participated in university level research  was definitely as great as, if not greater than, I thought it would be.  Plus, another added bonus was that I was able to confirm my love of UPenn :)

…

This past Monday, after my volunteer shift at the hospital, I visited the lab to see how things are going.  I learned that 3.5 out of the 5 grams of the final product have been created and that the synthesis should be completed within a couple of weeks.   I also saw a very early draft of the publication of the class of compounds that I was working on!

Thanks,

GabRoss

Long Overdue Part 2 (6th Week)---- Rotimi Opeke

But now, there is another problem that has come to the forefront. I cannot build the solar cells devices that I need because of a lack of proper foundation. Because we build these miniature solar cells on a glass substrate, the glass must be coated in one of the two necessary cathodes. The glass that we bought is completely covered in ITO instead of a strip that we need, so it seems we will manually have to erode the excess ITO from the surface of the glass. Using some fancy equipment and some UV staining, we should be able to erode away the ITO that we need, but nothing is certain. Wish me luck, because at this point this will decided whether I will have to come back in the fall to finish the experiment.

Long Overdue Part 1 (6th Week)---- Rotimi Opeke

My 1 1/2 week absence from the blog has been unexcusable, but things have been very busy in the past 2 weeks and I hope you can excuse my lack of journal entries.

After a weekend away from NJ with the Peddie Basketball team in Albright, PA, the push began to start recording my experimental data. I had met with Dr. Soboyejo on Friday of the previous week, right before he had left for Nigeria and he had asked me to take x-ray diffractions of the samples I was making. This was a bit of a surprise to me, but he claimed that recording chemical and structure composition were the two most "important" facets of my data. Unfortunately on Monday, July 11, the graduate students that were part of his research group informed me that I wouldn't be able to take X-Ray diffractions with the samples I was using.

Now what. My project had changed multiple times since I had come to the lab, and right when I was ready to begin, there was a problem. Dr. Soboyejo had long gone to Nigeria, and now it was up to me to draft a new project. With pressure to complete an actual project before I leave for home on August 6, I spent the next two days in Princeton Public Library writing and editing a new proposal that was as straightforward as possible.

End of Week 5 - Kate Wang

This is my last post ever to this blog. I can't believe it's already been 5 weeks!

On Thursday, Vince went over how to use an HPLC (high performance liquid chromatography) with me and I think I understood most of it. Then I started the usual trials and Rob also gave me polymers to sieve and wash while I was waiting. I think on Wednesday Tom went over how to use the GC (gas chromatography) with me and he used this great analogy with zoo animals breaking out and something. Then, after I finished everything I had to do, I went around and took photos of most of the people that I worked with but I missed a couple since they'd already left by the time I was done. I'd also brought in the cookiebrownie which everyone really liked. 

On Friday, my last day, I started out with the usual trial and I also sieved a polymer. Later, Dr. Chan walked me through how to use an ELISA machine (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay). After that, they surprised me with an oreo ice cream cake and everyone came and it was like a small farewell party! We all sat and talked and ate delicious ice cream. After that, Humayra walked me through the Luminex machine which is almost like a fancy ELISA machine. Then, at the end of the day I hung out with Rob and Simon for a while before saying all my goodbyes and going home.

Over all, I think this has been a great experience and I met some very interesting and fun people. I really hope that I can visit them again sometime and I invited almost all of them to the dinner in November :)

Half of Week 5 - Kate Wang

I can't believe it's already the last week. I only have two more days!! This is absurd. So what happened in the past three days. On Monday I re-ran one of the trials that seemed funky only to come up with an even funkier result. After that, I had a chat with Dr. Chan that went on for about an hour and a half. It was a mix between a crash course biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, polymers, and medical terms. It was really productive though and I learnt a lot. We went over what I'd done so far and about the trials and controls and possibilities for my poster and presentation.

And then on Tuesday (yesterday) I re-ran another polymer that I'd messed up on (twice) and I think my final numbers were okay but a little low. Oh well, and then at the end of the day, I didn't know if I was supposed to present to Dr. Chan again so I ended up hanging out with Rob instead. 

Today, I ran another new polymer and got negative numbers :( I think for a little while in the middle of my work, I kept getting negative numbers but then after a while I started getting positive numbers which was really good only to ruin my streak and go back to negative numbers. Hopefully my numbers tomorrow will be positive. 

Tomorrow I'm bringing the cookiebrownie that I finally got around to making and I'm also bringing in my camera to get pictures for presentation and poster etc. and I believe that is it.

Week ???-PK

Yeah... It's been along time since I've "talked" to you guys. A lot has happened in the past few weeks. First off, Dr. Peretz and Ms. Rodrigue came to visit my lab. I took a day off for July 4th (yay!) and am currently on a week vacation. I actually started the week vacation the day before I was supposed to give a talk with Teuta, my supervisor, and Steven, the senior undergraduate. Most people would say that good, but in reality, it's very bad. Firstly because I have to give my presentation without any help from Steven (I probably would have looked better with him presenting before or after me). Secondly  because when I come back and give the presentation, I'll forget most of what I did these past few weeks.

I have done a lot of things these past few weeks. I'm almost done with the program, I just need to edit a few lines. I've read a lot more literature simply because I am actually planning my experiment now. Based upon what I read and what I expect, that's what I am probably going to be studying. I also get to make my own primer with the help of Teuta; however, I'm not done yet. I'm really excited to start on that part of the project! Also, there's been some pretty interesting things with the results. I'd love to attach it here, but right now I can't since I need to be connected to Princeton's network.

Since my last post, I've been much better with the tricky procedure. I'm actually doing the whole procedure by myself. Teuta just does her thing and only randomly peeks in to make sure I'm not messing up any lab procedures. The only thing I don't know how to fix is the really big, complex, and expensive optical trap. It's basically an inverted light microscope that focuses light to "trap" and control small particles (less than 1 um!). It can even be used to play tetris! Too bad I don't have time for that :(

Another thing I need to do when I get back is making growth curves because I have been working with different strains and each strain has a different incubation time. It's very annoying to find out that after 4 hours of work, you can't continue because you waiting too long. So I have plenty to do in the next few weeks. I can't believe summer is almost 1/2 over!~

Peace~

-PK 

End of Week 4 - Kate Wang

I kind of had a bad day yesterday. I kept dropping things, spilling things, and then having to redo them, etc. And then the worst of all was when I forgot to save each of the samples after I put them through the UV spec so my entire day’s work basically went to waster. At the end of the day I had two full hours where I had nothing to do so for the last hour of so I just hung out with Simon and Anthony and later Rob. And Simon wanted me to tell his famous turtle joke on here so here goes:

Why did the turtle cross the free way??

Take the “F” out of Free and the “F” out of way.

Punch line: there is no “F” in way! (There is no effing way..)

Also Simon was trying to teach me how to spin the pen around my thumb and the two times that I did manage to do it, none of them were watching so they didn’t believe me.

Today, I re-ran the trial that I forgot to save yesterday, only to find out that I’d made the stock solution wrong. Sometimes I make 250mL and sometimes only 200mL and I’d accidentally put the wrong amount of the solute into the 250mL volumetric flask. Other than that, I broke something again today, it was only one of the small flasks I use for the assays but this means that I am up to five broken things in four weeks. Which really isn’t that bad compared to Rob’s record but still. It makes me feel really clumsy.

Half of Week 4 - Kate Wang

I know I wrote a post just yesterday but here’s another one for week 4. I can’t believe this is already my second to last week! Time is going by way too quickly. Today I finished tests for the data that I will be presenting as part of my research. Over the past three working days I tested three different sized polymers for their absorbance of a macromolecule. I got good results for all of them and found a visible trend which is really good.

Other than that, not much has happened since I last posted. I still haven’t brought in the cookie brownie since I don’t have a stick of butter lying around in the room. 

Oh, Dr. Peretz visited yesterday morning and I showed her around the lab. One of the guys who work in production, Simon, told me he thought Dr. Peretz was very pretty and asked me if she was married.  I told him that yes she was and I would pass on the message so if you are reading this now, Dr. Peretz, Simon (the Asian you met in the lab along with Rob) thinks you are very pretty. He actually reminded me about it again today at lunch and asked if Dr. Peretz had asked about him. I told him I hadn’t talked to Dr. Peretz since. I think you have an admirer, Dr. Peretz.

Right now, I’m just digging for stuff to do since I finished my assays and I have about one and a half hours left till I can leave. Although technically I could leave now but that means I’d have to work extra some other day to make sure I can fill the 200 hours required. So, instead I decided to write this post. Another thing I could be doing is working on the poster that we’ll be presenting in the fall but I already changed everything that I could on it other than the data. And I don’t particularly want to keep reading the books Tom and Rob gave me since I’m at the point where they don’t make much sense anymore so I guess I’ll just have to find something else to occupy my time with. In the end, Rob told me to start putting my data into charts and graphs.  

End of Week 3 - Kate Wang

I know I was supposed to post this at the end of last week but because of some password issues I didn’t get a chance to post it until today.

Anyway, not much has happened since I last posted. Today I started working on the project that I will actually be presenting in the fall since everything I’ve been doing up till now has really been practice and research for the company. Now I’m finally starting the project to determine the correlation between particle size and the absorbance of a macromolecule. The first polymer that they gave me to test was really small and particle sizing with the microscope was very difficult to do since the computer wouldn’t recognize the separate beads without me having to remove majority of the selections they made. Also, the polymer gave some ridiculously high adsorption rates which was very good since it helped Tom figure out what size is the most helpful in absorbing the macromolecule.

At the end of the day, Rob had to leave early and I didn’t know how to find something to occupy my time with so I asked Tom if he had anything I should work on and so he told me I should start working on my presentation (which I didn’t really want to do yet since I wasn’t 100% sure that I understood everything yet). Luckily, in the end Rob gave me some polymer to wash. Also, we ran out of one of the buffers that I use to make stock solution so I had to mix together all of the previous stock solution which was very tedious and irritating because of the shape of the volumetric flasks. In the end, I did look at the power point slightly while I was waiting between the washes. 

Week 4 and Beginning of Week 5- GR

I completely forgot to write any posts last week (sorry, Dr. Peretz), so this will summarize all of last week and also today...

On Monday and Tuesday of Week 4, I continued the characterization of GR-1 (whose real name is CNDR-51489) and also the synthesis of the main compound.  We were able to make about 600 mg of the final amine, purified and ready to go.  There was a blip in the purification process, but it ended up working out and we found a very efficient way to purify more samples in the future.  It was thought that this compound could only be purified by the expensive, time consuming HPLC method, so that's where we began, in the HPLC room.  We were disappointed to discover that the HPLC was not working as well as was needed. The product still contained impurities after.  This unfortunate circumstance led us to retry using silica gel column chromatography.  This ended up working fantastically.  The column was quick and easy to run (unlike some other ones that I had to struggle through), the final fractions were very clean, and we were able to put all of the compound into one column compared to the 10 that would be needed for HPLC purification.  It was basically an all around win.  Also, Dr. Peretz visited the lab on Tuesday, so Carlo and I showed her all of the cool stuff that I've been using.

For the rest of the week (up through today as well), I was at a biology lab in the Center for Neurodegenerative Disease Research.  It was a completely different experience.  In addition to the fact that I didn’t really do much work myself (I mainly watched people because I had no experience in the tasks that were being performed), it was a completely different atmosphere then in the chem lab.  The lab itself is much newer, so that was cool, but the type of work was completely different.  It was mainly micropipetting samples into wells.  Plus, the amounts are so miniscule that you can barely see what you're doing.  It's pretty tedious stuff.  The cool thing though, was that, based on the two assays that were analyzed (one was a ThT flourescence assay and the other a sedimentation assay), my compound is actually more active than the one we are making for in vivo testing.  There were a few discrepancies in the data though, so that might not be 100% true, but still, I was happy.  I also got to keep the gel of the protein that we ran as a souvenir :)

I really can't believe that it's already my last week in the lab…

Thanks,

GabRoss

Week 3 Part 2 (Rotimi Opeke)

Well the pressure is on.

I have a month left, and I still have much to do. The lab techniques for sample preparation are out of the way, I just need to learn how to analyze these samples. Although I have already taken a class in how to use the Scanning Electron Microscope, my PI still is asking for me to learn how to use the Atomic Force Microscope in order to analyze the active layers for my project.

 At the end of last week, I prepared dummy samples to run under the SEM microscope. They were created at 1/2 of the normal polymer concentration, specially meant for practice purposes only. In the hope that my project advisor was going to show up today, I ran these dummies under the SEM microscope, but to no success.

I was able to procure a clear picture,  but at a very low magnification, and it seems it was only a scratch mark and not anything special with the surface morphology. The microscopy specialist told me that I will have to learn how to coat my samples in ions so that the SEM machine works better. It's a shame that the next class is on July 25....

I have a lot of questions and doubts and not a lot of answers from anyone (but the microscopy expert Jerry). I hope to see my advisor in the lab, but no response from text messages in the morning seem like a clear sign that I won't get those questions answered today.

Ala Viva

Middle of Third Week - Kate Wang

So I'm still doing the exact same stuff. Although we did have a meeting today so now I finally understand what I am actually doing and all the numbers finally make sense. Also, I got really good numbers today. Turns out that the numbers today were very important since both Tom and Vince came and asked if I was done. Actually, yesterday I finished so early that I had two hours at the end where I just didn't know what to do. I was talking to Rob and apparently he didn't have much to do either. In the end, I asked Matt if he had anything for me to do so I spent the last hour or so washing dirty glassware. But that's okay with me.

Anyway. Also, Tom is already starting to help me prep for the presentation that isn't taking place until autumn but I am grateful since this helps me figure out if I have any questions I need to ask or if there is anything I need to do extra research on. Which there is a lot of actually, since all this stuff is organic chemistry which I haven't learned a lot about and when I was reading articles for the EXP class, it was mostly about the medical side, not so much about the research and development of it which is what I'm working in now. Either way, this can be my crash course in organic chem and hopefully it'll help me in the autumn when I take my actual organic chem class. 

2nd Part of Wk2

I'm really bad with the days and since my last post was the end of week one we'll just call this the end of week two because it has been a while.....

So in the last few days to be honest, not much has been done in the lab. My "advisor" Tiffany Tong went to her hometown Milwaukee for her high-school reunion and my PI is in Nigeria getting funding for his research. So for the past few days, (friday included) I have just been mixing solutions in preparation for creating my actual lab samples on Thursday. Everything is really expensive so I can't treat it like mixing gatorade in water and go for saturation; I have to be extra conscious to dilute all my practice runs by a factor of 10^-1 or 10^-2 before spin coating it on the glass slides.

Seems like tomorrow is a big day for me because I will be attending a SEM training session bright and early tomorrow morning (9:30 pm) and probably working until 7pm tomorrow night. After the class, I have to finish making P3HT:PCBM:Ti02 active layers on glass slides, meet with my PI to finalize project details and meet with my adviser to coordinate schedules for the coming weeks. I doubt I will be able to play for Peddie in the Summer League tomorrow and that hurts, but there are more to come.

Ala Viva