As soon as I came to the new haven area, first thing I had to do was to check out the house I rented. It was nice, had clean bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom. House owners had two cute pugs. The house was about ten minutes away on foot from my lab and I liked everything except the internet was kind of laggy at times. The professor came by to the house I am staying, said hello, and he brought me to the Korean marketplace nearby so that I can shop some foods to cook at home at times. I bought mostly instant foods since I can't cook well.
On our ride back to the house, professor told me something quite interesting yet unexpected. I had spent a summer two years ago in Georgia Tech with Dr. Kim regarding cerium oxide nanoparticle and its acute toxicity, and both myself and Dr. Kim were expecting me to work on expanded version of the same research. However, Dr. Kim informed me that he had recently started a cooperative research with Korean condo company regarding surface disinfection using UV lights, and that he wanted me to take part in this along with his other graduate student, Stephanie, instead of the nanoparticle research. Having been kind of "not very excited for this summer" since I already kind of knew exactly what I would be doing and because I knew that acute toxicity research with cerium oxide often involves very tedious and boring repetition of counting microorganisms under microscope, I was actually very happy to hear the news.
Well, all the works I have done in the spring term EXP may not be useful for the new research with UV disinfection. But, life's tough. And strong falcons deal with it.
The day after, I went to the Mason laboratory, and met Stephanie. She was grad student who just came to yale last year after finishing her science works in Toronto university. She was very kind and nice and gave me many research papers and other background information to read about UV disinfection processes. She briefly described the research with Korean condo company she is working with under Dr. Kim to me. The project itself seemed kind of commercially-evident, in that the company is trying to get some data approval of renowned university research team that their condo is safe from bacterias and stuff, but the research itself and the field of disinfection using UV lights seemed quite interesting so I was getting excited. I was not able to enter the lab because I was supposed to get some laboratory safety training stuff so she toured me around the building, but I could not really enter the labs themselves.
I spent many hours reading numerous research papers under each of these categories:"Introduction to light and the electromagnetic spectrum," "Introduction to pathogens in the environments," "Using UV light for disinfection," and "Advanced Oxidation." Some of the concepts I did not really understand originally as I am reading these materials for the first time, but some parts I got it and I asked those parts aI did not get to Steph later on.
I received the lab training couple days later, and Steph referred to this delay as Yale's bureaucracy saying that they are not good at handling stuffs as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, I learned a lot from Steph, Dr. Kim, and the readings about the research that I would be conducting over summer.
After the training was complete, I was eventually allowed to enter the actual labs. There were one huge lab space in the second floor of the building, small tiny lab space for myself to work on in the third space, and I was using couple other facilities in the third floor such as the autoclaving machine or incubator and shakers that were in other labs of the third floor but I would be using at times.
The actual lab works started with making different solutions that would be used to cultivate the bacteria, E Coli. I made phosphate buffer solution and LB broth following after the procedures Steph taught me. E Coli culture was prepared and incubated for later extraction of samples, and I prepared forty plates containing solidified broth solution for the E Coli bacteria to dwell on. I was told that I would be growing E Coli and try to understand the correlation between time v. CFU, time v. OD measurements, and CFU v. OD measurements.
Aside from the lab stuffs, I got to enjoy good foods in the new haven area and exercised daily in the second largest gym facility in United States.
First week was full of unexpected, yet fun and fun stuffs.
No comments:
Post a Comment