It's been a week full of new people and new toys. I have a good feel for how research is performed on a day to day basis, and I've been introduced to a number of cool toys, many of which cost tens of thousands of dollars. More to come on that later. First the people. Dr. Ünlü is the professor in charge of the entire lab, which consists of about 15 people. There are researchers who work at the school and run the day to day projects in the lab. Dr. Lopez (Carlos) is my go-to guy, and he's one of them. Then there are post-doctoral fellows, who have their PhDs and are continuing to do research, but with guidance from the researchers and Dr. Ünlü. Lower on the food chain you have graduate students working on masters and doctoral degrees, and then finally a couple undergraduates. At the very bottom you have me and my partner, Jared. Thankfully it's rare for everyone to show up at the same time because the lab room itself is actually rather small.
But it's quite impressive what can be fit into such a small space. The main attraction is the pride and joy of the lab, a one-of-a-kind instrument that these people have developed. It's called IRIS, the Interferometric Resonant Imaging Sensor. Sounds fancy, but it's just a set of LED lights, prisms, mirrors, and a video camera. It's special because it can use light to measure the thickness of the tiniest amounts of stuff (proteins, dirt, blobs of liquid) on a slide. One day they hope to be able to identify viruses and determine the amount of virus by using this instrument on living tissue. Perhaps a blood sample. Right now I'm helping them test it on "simulated" virus particles, which in this case means gold beads. Yes, I'm playing with pure gold. It's not worth much though, since the gold beads are so small you would need an incredibly powerful microscope to see them.
Good thing the lab has one of those too.
July 7, 2011
July 6, 2011
A Mission
I've been feeling a little worried about the program lately since it seemed like no one in the lab really knows what to do with us. On the two occasions that we've been shown equipment for a demo process, the equipment has broken down. Our coordinator's time is limited, and while he clearly wants to do what's best for us, I'm not sure he knows what that is.
Today though at the end we spent some time with him, and we finally got a clear mission: learn how to functionalize gold nanobeads. This is going to be a lot of research, pouring through journal articles and the internet in general, but this is what I signed up for, and I hope that maybe I can make a small contribution to the lab through it.
Today though at the end we spent some time with him, and we finally got a clear mission: learn how to functionalize gold nanobeads. This is going to be a lot of research, pouring through journal articles and the internet in general, but this is what I signed up for, and I hope that maybe I can make a small contribution to the lab through it.
July 5, 2011
Day 1
Today was a pretty perfect counter-example to the ideas we have in our head of research. When I think of research, I imagine seasoned veterans with PhDs and white hair diligently pipetting solutions into well plates. I imagine whiteboards covered in incomprehensible equations. What I got today was not any of that.
After meeting with our head researcher to discuss our project, we followed a grad student to the clean room to practice making one of the basic components that we would need for our experiment to work. It was the equivalent of learning how to pump gas so that you could drive a car. No gas, no working car. So we get dressed up for the clean room, and that means bunny suits. You can see how they got that name:
We have to wear these to protect the materials from dust and other particles that our bodies give off.
So anyway we go the lab, get dressed, and then start the process of making our materials. Today that means we need to make a silicon wafer, which I'll just call "the chip." First we clean the chip, which is easy. Just wash it with some chemicals and then dry it off by blowing nitrogen gas on it. But we go to blow the gas and it turns out that the lab is out of gas. The nitrogen comes out with such little pressure that it won't dry the chip. Oh well, we think, we'll try another lab station. So we hit another one, but same result. Guess we have to use a paper towel. This is horribly against the rules because it will make it impossible to get a proper chip created, but we do it anyway because this is just a practice run, and we need to get to the rest of the steps.
Next we have to put photoresist on the chip. This is a fun chemical that reacts to light. We open the cabinet, and while it appears to be overflowing with bottles of photoresist, none is the correct type for our chip. We pick one that seems "close enough" and use it anyway. After applying it to the chip using a special spinning machine, it appears that the photoresist was not applied correctly, and the chip is a complete loss. Whatever, we think, let's go through the steps anyway just to get practice. So we go to the machine that we need next, but it happens to be giving a loud beeping error message: lamp overheating. Why? Turns out that the same nitrogen which we needed to dry our chip is also used to keep the lamp cool in this machine. So we turn the machine off since no one can use it.
Error after error after error, and no one was really at fault. That's research for you. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't. Tough luck.
After meeting with our head researcher to discuss our project, we followed a grad student to the clean room to practice making one of the basic components that we would need for our experiment to work. It was the equivalent of learning how to pump gas so that you could drive a car. No gas, no working car. So we get dressed up for the clean room, and that means bunny suits. You can see how they got that name:
We have to wear these to protect the materials from dust and other particles that our bodies give off.
So anyway we go the lab, get dressed, and then start the process of making our materials. Today that means we need to make a silicon wafer, which I'll just call "the chip." First we clean the chip, which is easy. Just wash it with some chemicals and then dry it off by blowing nitrogen gas on it. But we go to blow the gas and it turns out that the lab is out of gas. The nitrogen comes out with such little pressure that it won't dry the chip. Oh well, we think, we'll try another lab station. So we hit another one, but same result. Guess we have to use a paper towel. This is horribly against the rules because it will make it impossible to get a proper chip created, but we do it anyway because this is just a practice run, and we need to get to the rest of the steps.
Next we have to put photoresist on the chip. This is a fun chemical that reacts to light. We open the cabinet, and while it appears to be overflowing with bottles of photoresist, none is the correct type for our chip. We pick one that seems "close enough" and use it anyway. After applying it to the chip using a special spinning machine, it appears that the photoresist was not applied correctly, and the chip is a complete loss. Whatever, we think, let's go through the steps anyway just to get practice. So we go to the machine that we need next, but it happens to be giving a loud beeping error message: lamp overheating. Why? Turns out that the same nitrogen which we needed to dry our chip is also used to keep the lamp cool in this machine. So we turn the machine off since no one can use it.
Error after error after error, and no one was really at fault. That's research for you. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don't. Tough luck.
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