Week 4 - Thursday July 26th, 2012 - The Clean Room

This Tuesday and last all of the RETs had time in the clean room! Below you see Valerie and I in our bunny suits. We have to wear these to protect the products we are making and using in the cleanroom. With the suits on it is very unlikely any skin or hair or other debris will fall from our bodies onto what we are working with!

We are taking the large silicon wafers seen below and eventually turning them into chips with some Prep school spirit on them!

The schematic to the right explains what we have done to the wafer. Read the schematic top down. First we applied photoresist. Then we placed a mask (essentially a stencil with my Prep pride) on the wafer and irradiated it with UV light. The light broke down the photoresist that was not blocked by the stencil, thus putting my design onto the wafer.  The next week we did deposition (the machine below does this step). In deposition we deposit titanium and then gold on top of our wafer. This seems to wipe out our design but after a dip in an acetone bath and shaker, the gold brushes off the unexposed area - leaving our original design.      Next week you will see the final product - for now I need to go back to analyzing data in MatLab. 

Week 3 - Friday July 20th, 2012 - The Full Length Feature Film

And now... the full length feature film you've all been waiting for......

                      The RET Experience!!!
                                                by Stephanie Giglio and Valerie Ordway

                                      

As it turns out, our lab made a professional film of their own recently. To see their film, done for the Journal of Visualized Experiments, click on this --> Click here for a Video Publication from our lab!

Week 3 - Tuesday July 17th, 2012 - the Trailer!

So... by the end of the week Valerie and I will have a video out that will explain and demonstrate some of the AWESOME SCIENCE we are doing every day.... Here's a little trailer for you....

Week 2 - Friday July 13th, 2012 - Headway on our Expt!

It's Friday the 13th and today our pedagogy meeting was canceled so Valerie and I headed back to the lab and finally started making some real headway!

It's about time I give you an overview on what we are doing.

Our lab has developed a machine, the IRIS, that shots a ray of LED light at a very small nano-chip. By comparing the way the light bounces off of the chip both before and after a substance has been adhered to the chip - we can determine how much of this substance is present. The idea is in the near future, to be able to put a drop of blood on a chip coated with anitbodies for different viruses. If the blood has any of the viruses, it will adhere to the antibody for that virus and change the interference pattern of the LED light.  The IRIS can analyze this change and therefore run a test that could diagnose a patient with any number of viruses at once.

Currently, Valerie and I are working at finding an antibody we can place on the chip that will adequately capture the H1N1 flu virus. We spent several days doing online and telephone research and leg-work to find an antibody that looks promising and has been testing in similar experiments to ours (antibodies cost $500 for a VERY TINY amount so we can't just test them willy-nilly). While we are waiting for the antibodies we finally ordered to come in, we decided to test an antibody George already had.

We purified the antibody George had on-hand and spotted it on the chip. Then after a pre-wash, wash, and block we added the flu virus! Here is a picture of our chip incubating in the H1N1 virus (we're hoping this virus will stick to the antibody we added earlier).

To test if this antibody works to actually catches the flu we imaged the chip with the antibody pre-virus (a control) and then the chip with the antibody after the viral incubation. We will compare these images and analyze this data next week, at which point I will be able to tell you then more about how we will measure our results.  If this antibody doesn't succeed we will try again with the ones we ordered online!

To the right is a picture of the low-mag IRIS we used to take images of the chip. And below(the green image) is a post-scan we took after the viral incubation.




As the summer progresses our work will broaden. Once we find an antibody that works to capture H1N1 (if we find an antibody that works!) we will analyze data both with a high-mag single particle IRIS and with a new, more user-friendly, NSF-AIR. If we are getting consistent results from both we will help the lab provide evidence that the NSF-AIR machine is a reliable way to gather data. I will write much more about this process when we get there!

See the barely there blurry little circles? Those are our spots - this is where we put the antibody. I can't tell yet if virus actually adhered yet - but we will learn this next week so I will keep you updated!!!

Now it's time to start my weekend! 

Week 2 - Thursday July 12th, 2012 - The people I spend my day with!

Valerie sitting in our usual spot outside the lab!

One of the best parts of this RET program is meeting so many new people. To the right is Valerie! She is my partner and a middle school teacher in Sharon with a LOT of teaching experience. Valerie has been an excellent person to spend my day with - she is thoughtful and meticulous and has great ideas for how to make science more accessible to students.

Valerie and George

  Behind Valerie to the left is George. George is our go-to-guy. He is a graduate student at BU who also received his undergrad degree here. He is teaching Valerie and I how to do all of the lab protocols we are working on (I will go into more detail on this in a later post). George is very hard-working and currently involved in a number of different projects, but makes time to show us what he's up to. He even took us down to the clean-room the other day (more on that later).

Carlos

On the right is Carlos - Carlos is a post-doc who has spent a lot of time showing Valerie and I the ropes. He's friendly and dedicated and pretty much runs the labs - or so it seems so far!!!

In this picture he is sitting at the single particle detector that we have recently learned how to use. I will include more details and pictures of this in a later post as well!




Oh, I suppose I should include a picture of myself... Well here I am - working on this blog!

Week 2 - Thursday July 12th, 2012 - The Lab Meeting...

This Wednesday, Valerie and I were able to sit in on our lab's weekly LAB MEETING - during this meeting lab business (who broke what, what needs to be replaced, who is coordinating the lab outing) is discussed, and one member of the lab does a PowerPoint presentation about how her research is currently going.

Since each member of the lab is working on different projects, the presenter must provide background and technical knowledge to the crowd, explain what has lead to where she is now, what roadblocks she is still encountering in her research, and what she plans to do next. Not only is the lab member presenting this material, she then is peppered with questions from the rest of the lab about why she did this or didn't do that. 

This entire meeting was a great learning opportunity for me both as a researcher and as a teacher. First of al,l it filled in some of the pieces of technical understanding I was missing. Secondly, it emphasized the importance of presentation skills! In high school science classes this skill is mostly overlooked. I do some presentation work with my seniors, but this made me want to do more and come up with different, some more formal, some more informal options for presenting work. I would also love to find a way to bring this into my sophomore Chem I classes. 

On a related note, our brown bag lunch talk this week with Prof. Ruane was mainly about the publish or perish cycle of how to get research communicated. He discussed the large number of ways communication occurs in the scientific community. From this lecture I am going to try to come up with more ways my students can learn to communicate what they are learning. From 2 paragraph "letters" they could write at the end of class to get the buzz out there right away about what they learned that day, to written "journal article" lab reports that take some time to produce I hope to find more ways to fold this aspect of science, scientific communication, into my classroom.

Week 1 - Friday July 6th, 2012 - Back in Lab

One week into the RET.....

When I left college I thought I was going to be a research scientist. I had worked in a lab throughout college and had signed on to continue full-time. Two years of pipetting very small amounts of liquid later, I accidentally ended up teaching HS science instead. 

Teaching is incredible - but I've always missed the laboratory atmosphere and the intellectual acuity of everyone working so hard to discover things that never been explored before.

The Research Experience for Teachers program has given me a chance to go back to the lab - and boy has it been a strange experience this week.

First of all the acronyms are overwhelming - and I knew some of them coming in! I am in the RET (Research Experience for Teachers) program at BU (Boston University) in the OCN (Optical Characterization and Nanophotonics) lab working with the IRIS (Interferometric Reflectance Imaging System) to image the hopeful capture of the N1N1 virus. Thankfully, I seem to be accessing a part of my brain that has been dormant for years and I recognize a lot of the acutal reagents we are using during the wet work.


The labs we are working in are a little small and crowded but loaded with awesome exciting equipment. The IRIS which the lab is busy developing is the main piece of equipment I've used. There are 3 different iterations of the machine in the lab right now (a high mag, low mag, and new more portable version). All three of these use LEDs which are much safer and more inexpensive than earlier versions which used lasers. But don't worry - there are still lasers and laser curtains throughout the entire lab.


We have not been invited into the lab workspace very often so have only really spoken with the two people we are working with, a post-grad Carlos, and a grad student, George. They have been very helpful and I have been peppering them with questions about their academic and career backgrounds and how they like being research scientists.


The project I am working on mainly involves finding an antibody we can attach to our chip which will most effectively capture the flu virus (A/PR/8/34) we want to detect. We are learning lab protocol involved in spotting the Ab on the plate, blocking, washing, and imaging the plates using the IRIS, incubating with virus, and then imaging again. Finally I hope to learn how to analyze the data as well.

Overall - a good first week. I really hope I get to spend more and more time in the lab as the summer progresses!