Bringing you the latest news from the Gerdon Research Group
This past weekend of an Open House at Emmanuel for interested high school students to check out all that Emmanuel College has to offer. A few students, including Lana, helped out Dr. Ahmad and Dr. Gerdon in a chromatography activity for the families. The paper chromatography was pretty simple, but gave insight into the TLC, gel electrophoresis, or LC-MS that student get to work with in their lab in Chemistry. Plus, they make some great aura...
It seems like the State of the Project reports at the end of the summer, and the food safari through Boston and Brookline, was just yesterday. Now we’re already into October and the Fall semester is cruising along. So, welcome back to all chemists and researchers! Our semester is going really well with an expanded group – Gwyn has joined us to work on carbon nanodots, Noah to work on mouse enamel, Ellie to analyze social justice chemistry, and Donald to work on GC-MS – all in addition to the great work that Ann-Lee, Lana, and Georgia did this summer and are continuing this Fall. We have already been working hard to get abstracts submitted to the Spring ACS conference in Atlanta. Recently, Ann-Lee, Lana, and Georgia had the opportunity to present their work from the summer at our Emmanuel College Summer Research Poster Session. They did an outstanding job and were able to share their work with a wide range of majors, first-year students, faculty, family, and administrators. Congrats on your great work! (One small enthusiast seems to...
The GRAB Lab group teamed up with Dr. Lau’s group for an exciting and fun-filled final week of research. We made the most of Boston by going on an adventurous food safari, sampling Korean corn dogs, Texas tacos, bubble tea, local pizza, and fresh-made ice cream. It amounted in a great city walk and good eats! Today, the summer projects paused for us to reflect on the past 10 weeks and to share State of the Project reports. No project is every really done, right? But where is the project right now and what comes next when we return for the Fall semester? Georgia, Lauren, Ann-Lee, Maddie, and Lana gave great presentations and the audience, from toddler to professor, were all enthralled. Time to relax, enjoy the rest of the summer, and dream of that next...
Two amazing high school students from Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School spent a week as part of the research team in the Gerdon and Lau labs in Chemistry at Emmanuel College. It was a great experience for the HS students and our undergraduate researchers to participate as students and teachers – we learned a lot from each other this week, built our confidence in the lab, and had a lot of fun. Melannie worked with the GRAB Lab team and did a great job synthesizing nanoparticles, purifying them, reacting them in a successful place exchange, and analyzing them with gel electrophoresis. That’s a lot of work for one week! Thank you to Dr. Lau, Dr. Deighan, Dr. Gian Grant at NDCR, and funding from IQHQ for making this happen. We hope to have more NDCR students work with us in the...
After much trial and error with the QCM (Quartz Crystal Microbalance) flow cell design, a finalized set up has been achieved! With this new set up, Lana has been able to complete her dynamic mineralization control experiments and is moving on to experiments with DNA aptamers. Hopefully, things continue to run smoothly and comparisons between the aptamers and the control experiments can be made soon! While waiting for experiments to run, Lana likes to walk Boston in search of new restaurants, new foods, and especially new treats and desserts! Pictured here is collagen that has been fibrilized, washed, and dried on the surface of a QCM crystal. The collagen has this amazing diffraction effect that makes these great rainbow colors. We know that all the salt has been washed away when we can see these rainbows...
Georgia can’t believe summer research is halfway through already! There has been great progress with TEM imaging, but she is still trying to troubleshoot IR, fluorescence, and AFM analysis. She has currently DIYed her own humidity chamber so she can do mineralization on the IR, and it seems to be going well. Although the heat is rising in the city, Georgia is excited for the second half of the summer. Overall, she thinks the project is going well and she is looking forward to getting her data together to hopefully get...