Blogs

This week has mostly involved me trying to store as much information as possible from the huge amount that is being thrown at me every day. I am working with Rachel, a PhD student, to study how pH affects phytoplankton, particularly a toxin producing kind known as Alexandrium. The one thing I truly have ingrained in my brain after my first week is how to wash the laboratory equipment. No matter how much washing I do one day, there is guaranteed to be plenty more to do the next.

This week, I began my internship at OHSU in the Institute of Environmental Health. The project I will be working on is Distribution and Fate of Emerging Contaminants in Oregon Rivers. More specifically, I will be trying to understanding the fate of metformin, a type II diabetes drug and its breakdown product guanylurea in the environment. Despite metformin being the most commonly prescribed drug for this disease, it is surprising that there is very little about its environmental impact.

24 June 2016

24 June 2016

Today I got a tour of campus, and started working with Tawnya Peterson on Geyer-MacCready plots.  I'm working to finish up what some students from last year were working on over the next 3 weeks

Test of blog

This week I continued sampling the experiments I had been conducting using zero valent iron, zinc and magnesium to degrade CT, TCE and TCP. Overall the iron was the only one that was significantly oxidizing any of the contaminants and it was only signficiantly degrading CT and TCP.  I conducted an updated calibration curve for each of the contaminants for future analysis of the gas chromatograph peak area in relation to concentration in ppm.

This week was a busy one as I attempted to complete data analysis, create my poster, and finish my final paper. Data analysis had to be completed first since I needed to be able to analyze trends before drawing up any conclusions that could be included in my poster presentation or final paper. I spent all of Monday and most of Tuesday working on data analysis. Because I ran four experiments, I had over 24 graphs to compare and look for trends in. Matt helped me analyze these graphs, as it was hard to summarize such an enormous amount of data.

Collecting daily time points continued this week. On Monday and Tuesday, I collected two time points and spent time measuring manganese oxide samples. This consists of spinning down the samples and then pipetting a small amount into a 48 well plate for measurement via the spectrophotometer. Each sample already had LBB added to it—the reagent that turns blue in the presence of manganese oxides. The intensity of blue is what is measured on the spectrophotometer. Given absorbance values are then used to determine oxide concentration.