Jan07
Posted on Jan 7 by
(Belated) congrats to two superstar alumni from Emmanuel College and from the GRAB Lab. In the past few months Aimee Sanford and Keith Baillargeon defended their doctoral theses to earn their PhDs in chemistry. Dr. Gerdon was really happy to attend both defenses via Zoom and is super proud of Dr. Sanford (Emory University) and Dr. Baillargeon (Tufts University). Aimee and Keith worked together in the lab at Emmanuel and rocked their Distinction in the Field projects before graduating in 2016. Keith was working on Precipitation SELEX, learning the tools of a molecular biologist. Aimee was deep in microfluidics, being an analytical chemist and a mechanical engineer. In graduate school, the tables turned! Aimee has gone one to do amazing work in structure-switching SELEX for biosensor development and Keith went head-first into analytical chemistry to develop portable and cost-efficient systems for blood analysis in the field. Both have extremely bright futures ahead of them and current GRAB Lab members are inspired! Here’s a throw back to ACS Boston in...
Dec07
Posted on Dec 7 by
The semester is quickly coming to a close and attention is shifting to final projects and final exams. This was a good opportunity for the group to reflect on the semester over delicious donuts from Union Square Donuts! Research students talked about learning new chemistry and getting to really get comfortable working with new instruments such as ICP-AES, NMR, qPCR, and more. Everyone was happy with progress made on research projects, but we all know that leads to new goals and new aspirations for the next experiment. The seniors are starting to talk about jobs and grad programs. New sophomore research students are reading literature and learning the ropes. We’re all really excited for the chance to get to the ACS conference in San Diego in March! It’s been a great semester and we can’t wait for what comes...
Dec02
Posted on Dec 2 by
Dianna has been back in the lab after a hiatus this summer making progress on the nanoparticle project. She has improved upon her original nanoparticle synthesis protocol and started working on the PEG attachment protocol. As the semester comes to a close, Dianna hopes to obtain TEM and 1H NMR spectra of her TMPCs with PEG attached to the surface. Overall, it’s been a productive semester in...
Dec02
Posted on Dec 2 by
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 disappointing since it has been a week since she’s been in lab after the holidays and she is eager to finish and gathering data. This is a good reminder that research is exciting, but not always easy and often times frustrating. At our weekly group meeting teammates were able to listen to Luz, sympathize with the frustration, and share similar stories of delay, delay, delay….followed by eventual success! Luz will be back in the lab tomorrow to get the GC-MS back on track. She was able to prep textile samples to be ready for the next...
Nov09
Posted on Nov 9 by
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 them to improve quality, but the progress feels...
Nov02
Posted on Nov 2 by
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...
