It’s already week 6 but it dosen’t feel like it, the time has gone by in a flash. Tuesday we had the opportunity to attend a presentation given by Dr. Harish Nagaranja, who is a senior scientist at Genomatica. Genomatica is a Bioengineering company that has explored in finding renewable ways to produce chemicals for products like plastics, cosmetics, and nylon. It was cool to hear that they have found natural alternatives to nonrenewable resources. He also told us his path of becoming a research scientist. Starting out in India and moving to San Diego to do his doctorates. Then going into Genomatica as an intro research scientist and working up to senior scientist. It was interesting to hear how he got to where he is now. After the presentation were tasked to come up without poster titles. This kind of came as a shock to some of us because we thought there was a lot more time. But with only 4 weeks left its best to get started on our posters and paper now, rather than later. On Wednesday the REU cohort and Summer Scholars were invited to participate in a mentorfest. It allowed us to talk to representatives of big companies like Thermo Fisher, Illumina, Viasat, Intuit and Hunter Industries. There with our peers we networked and ask questions to mentors of the companies. On Thursday a couple of us were craving some wings so we went over to Buffalo Wild Wings and got their 75¢ wings deal. We hung out and even received an order of cheese curds by mistake. Now reaching the end of the week we are all in lab working hard to continue our research projects.
For my research we are looking into how landscape practices effect the decomposition of litter from evergreen and deciduous leaves. This week i was able to weight out super tiny sample around 10 mg int tin cups. These were then put through into a Costech CHN elemental combustion system to see how much carbon and nitrogen are in our samples. With that data we can analyze it next week to see how the 5 different sites differ in decomposition.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Watch this space for weekly updates!Every week, one of our CSUSM NSF REU students will post their blurb, summarizing their week, and chronicling our program. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2023
Categories |