Bringing you the latest news from the Gerdon Research Group
Ann-Lee is taking a small break from mineralization experiments for the semester in order to learn about a new project! Gwyn has been teaching her all she needs to know about carbon-nano dots. This week they’ve performed such an easy microwave-based synthesis! In the future, we hope that we find a way to characterize these and understand their emissions. For now it is great to see that they...
After a rejuvenating winter break, Lana was eager to get back into her chemistry classes and labs this semester. The other research students seem to feel the same, as everyone has been jumping straight into new projects, whether that be an experiment or making DIY lab decor. Lana is especially excited to finally move beyond control experiments and start experimenting with DNA aptamers again. Feeling inspired by everything in the lab, Lana hopes to channel that creativity back into her...
Happy New Year from the GRAB Lab! The whole group is back at it to continue working on experiments this semester, to prepare for the ACS conference in Atlanta, and for end of year celebrations. Georgia is getting back into research, even through epic Boston snow storms. After submitting our manuscript on the mineralization of DNA origami (more to come later on this once published), she got back comments from reviewers, and she is now doing experiments to address those comments and improve the manuscript. Currently she is working on a kinetics experiment with the plate reader, and she is trying to optimize the experiment so we can get good results. She is also going to redo some more up to date controls on TEM grids. Overall, she is excited to wrap up experiments for the paper and...
The entire research team took a well-earned break to end the semester with the time-honored tradition of a trip to Tasty Burger! It was a working lunch – Dr. Gerdon, per usual, made sure everyone shared three successes of the semester and three goals for next semester. We also enjoyed some tots, kids meals, and delicious burgers. Congrats to the whole team on awesome experiments, big successes and learning moments, and on continuing to move forward. Now we focus on exams and then regroup in the new year to keep progress...
Micro-credentialing is a recent method for instilling skills into students and workers to ensure that they are prepared for the field they are trying to enter. It was my duty to create a protocol using micro-credentials that could test students’ knowledge in gas chromatography mass spectrometry. A mixture with a known pollutant was prepared and given to the students to analyze with GC-MS. It will be their job to use the instrument on their own and isolate this known pollutant with the protocol that I prepare for...
Congratulations are in order for awesome research students in the GRAB Lab! Congrats to Gwyn Gagnon ’26 for winning the Best Poster Award for the entire Gamma Sigma Epsilon conference that took place in Pennsylvania in October. Congrats to Ann-Lee Coriolan ’28 for being selected as a co-recipient of the Catherine McLaughlin Hakim ’70 Prize, awarded annually to a “high-achieving student in the summer science research...