Week 1

Wow! What a week. The first five days have been extremely busy and packed with a great deal of material. I started off the week conducting literature searches on the compound I’m going be studying this summer, manganese dioxide. It turns out that it has some pretty interesting properties that have not been examined in the context that CMOP is focused on. Over the next nine weeks I’m going be studying the reactivity of both synthetic and biogenic nano-sized MnO2. I’ve had the pleasure of being reintroduced to electrochemistry for the first time in two years and Jim has been an extremely patient and awesome mentor through this process. Experimentally, I have progressed much further than I would have even imagined at the beginning of the week and obtained some outstanding results. Currently, it looks like the research is going to take a whole new direction than originally planned and this is really exciting!