Day 16

I spent most of the day doing some write-ups on various medications that we are considering for usage with the wafers. This is exciting because it means we're now at the stage when we can actually load up the hydrogels with drugs and directly address a medical application. I closely examined three different specific medications and read many papers to learn about previous studies involving these compounds. In particular, I focused on the effectiveness and versatility of the drugs, keeping in mind that I needed to find something that would benefit from being released due to a change in pH.

Afterwards, I created some more prime layers under the new (time-consuming) synthesis and went to use the ellipsometer in order to measure the thicknesses of the different wafers following that procedure. Unfortunately, the ellipsometer was malfunctioning once again, and my various efforts to diagnose the problem were to no avail.

A little while later, I tried restarting the ellipsometer and, amazingly, it began working.