Gerdon Research Group Blog

Analytical and Biomaterials Undergraduate Chemistry Research

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Luz Padilla ’22 – Technical Difficulties and Frustrations

Posted by on Dec 2, 2021 in Posts, Student News

Luz has continued to work towards understanding the influence of different textiles on the GC-MS analysis of combustible materials, with an eye on forensics applications. Luz has been working with several different textiles and diesel standards in acetone. Due to technical difficulties with an unhappy computer, she had a frustrating time in lab.  This was...

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Dr. Gerdon – Small AFM successes!

Posted by on Nov 9, 2021 in Posts, Student News

Dr. Gerdon has had a very slow time in the lab this semester (where do the hours go?), but he is proud to have made some “small” progress on using the AFM at the MIT Koch Institute to image DNA origami tiles seen here. These tiles are about 60 x 90 nm in size and about 2 nm tall! So cool! There’s more work to be done, particularly in purifying...

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Julia Japo ’23 – new and improved collagen

Posted by on Nov 2, 2021 in Posts, Student News

Julia has been excited to start research again in the Fall. She has been doing a lot of data analysis and continues to conduct collagen mineralization experiments using a Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM). She is looking forward to continue improving the methods of these experiments and learn more about the process of collagen mineralization.

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Amanda Gilbert ’22 – SEM imaging is next!

Posted by on Nov 2, 2021 in Posts

This semester, Amanda has been busy continuing her work with collagen hydrogel mineralization! She has done a few different experiments with collagen and DNA aptamers, including her most recent experiment, which was a 7-day mineralization reaction. These hydrogels will be used for SEM imaging, which means she will have more cool images to analyze! Amanda...

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Grace Sanpietro ’22 – SPME and octane

Posted by on Oct 27, 2021 in Posts, Student News

Grace is excited to be back in the research lab this Fall to continue work from her summer internship. She will continue with Solid Phase Microextraction (SPME) and GC/MS analysis of ignitable molecules to continue developing methods and an in-house reference library of these molecules. Her first experiment back was completing the SPME analysis of octane...

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Summer Research Poster Session

Posted by on Oct 2, 2021 in Posts, Student News

Congrats to Grace, Luz, Julia, Rylie, and Amanda on their fantastic presentations at the Summer Research Poster Session on Thursday. Everyone did amazing work this summer and turned it into great poster presentations for the College-wide event. The students were tasked with explaining their research to chemistry professors alongside first year students in...

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