It is at times like this that one regrets being the only driver on the rental car agreement. I’m waking up a bit earlier than usual today so I can play chauffeur and deliver one of my colleagues to the airport. I take a look at my watch, and sadly it is correct. It feels like it is chirping at me too early this morning. Here is the account of my last day:Ĥ:30 AM: I must have mistakenly set my alarm last night. I will go into details on why these experiments are so fascinating in an upcoming blog post, but the purpose of this post is to give you an idea of what a day in the life of a graduate student on a research trip looks like. ![]() This is absolutely fascinating! Face to face with my mechanical love, the single molecule tracking microscope. More specifically, these experiments were designed to track individual lipid molecules diffusing within a model cell membrane (specifically, a supported lipid bilayer) with and without nanoparticles present. On this trip, we performed experiments focused on understanding how nanoparticles interact with a major component of cell membranes: lipids. On my most recent trip to PNNL in December 2014, I conducted research with two other CSN graduate students, Julianne Troiano from Northwestern University and Arielle Mensch from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The trip to Richland, WA is worthwhile because Galya’s is no ordinary lab: it contains a veritable treasure chest of fluorescence microscopes capable of performing super-resolution techniques such as STORM, SIM (see a SIM tutorial here), and single molecule tracking, which are some of the same techniques that were awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. I had the great opportunity to travel to her lab at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), which is a scientific national user facility located at PNNL, for two separate research trips in 2014. Galya is a collaborator within the Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology. Galya Orr, Dehong Hu, Arielle Mensch, yours truly, and Julianne Troiano basking in the glory of a room filled with fluorescent microscopes at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.Īs a life-long nerd and science-lover, it is hard to imagine a laboratory that could get me more excited than Galya Orr’s lab at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).
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