Introduction and Week 1 and 2 Update!

Hello fellow NEWT’s!

My name is Darya Pineda and I’m a Biotechnology Lab Technician student at Lone Star College in Houston. I’m writing a multi-part blog entry so, brace yourselves!

Week one at Rice was a very exciting week, learned a lot about the program and the interns in it. For example, the NEWT REU program lets community college student’s work on independent research projects in a lab at Rice University, University of Texas at El Paso or Arizona State University- depending in the area community college you’re enrolled in. It was nice to meet the people in the program, I love how diverse this group is- in age, cultural background, and career choice just to name a few. During that first week we also got to meet our mentors, and some of us got to meet with our hosts (or PI’s). My mentor is great, he’s a civil and environmental engineer PhD student, his name is Danning Zhang. He’s straightforward in a polite manner, strives for efficiency, he’s answered all of my questions so far about our project, and is super patient (Except for when it comes to prepare our samples for the Scanning Electron Microscope, in his defense, I wouldn’t be either). I haven’t been able to meet my PI, given that he’s going to be in China for the duration of the summer (He serves as an honorary professor at Nankai University in Tianjin and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China- I think that’s just awesome, might be stressful at times I assume, but awesome nonetheless). Working in Dr. Alvarez’s laboratory is very different than from the one I have been working in as a biotech student. In my side of the lab, at least, feels more relaxed about how the experiment is conducted, since I’m not working with biohazards as I’m accustomed to. Several times during the first week (And second) I’ve caught myself spritzing ethanol onto my gloves every time I’m working on a different area of the lab- and that’s because in the biotech lab we’re constantly making sure that our bacteria isn’t contaminated with undesired bacteria in our experiment. I’m sharing an office with three girls, they’re very nice and I enjoy being in their company, even if we’re all silently typing away on our computers.

During my second week at Rice I had started to gain an understanding about our project procedure and the why’s of it too. In the first week, Danning demonstrated how our TiO2 particles are synthesized. Our project is about using TiO2 (Titanium dioxide, or Titania) as a photocatalyst to degrade chemical pollutants in water. He’s been successful in degrading BPA and now, during these 10 weeks, we’re going to find out if TiO2 can degrade other contaminants from water. Reading all those papers have been very helpful. During week two our TiO2 particles were synthesized (That took Tuesday and Wednesday to achieve) and attached to cyclodextrin (which increases the affinity of the pollutants that will attach to our particles), and we made stock solutions of our pollutants. Now, on week three we’re going to run our pollutants through HPLC (High Performance Liquid Chromatography) to confirm the concentrations of our contaminant solutions, and I will most likely make another batch of synthesized TiO2 particles. So far, this is it! I appreciate the time you’ve put into reading through my blog, and I’m interested to see what else my fellow interns have to say about their experiences!

This is my first batch of synthesized TiO2 particles! (Only two of the six are adequate enough to be used in the next part of our experiment :'( ).