Day 23

On this day, I was unable to attend internship so I went to school and worked on my JSHS presentation for research.

Day 22

On this day, I went on a field trip.

Day 21

On this day, the seminar topic was my favorite of all the ones I've attended thus far. It was on the usage of block copolymer self-assembly to adjust various material properties, and I found the speaker to be very engaging and extremely clear and thorough in his explanations.

I created solutions of ethylene diamine, the cross-linker, and 1-(3-Dimethylaminopropyl)-3-ethylcarbodiimide hydrochloride, the activator. Then I did research on how the ellipsometer works in an endeavor to fix it. This endeavor was not successful.

Day 20

On this day, I continued to put wafers into solutions of phosphate buffer of varying pHs. In particular, I was looking at wafers that had been loaded with polymyxin B, a drug I investigated last time, and put them in a salt phosphate buffer solution in order to test their stability in physiological conditions.

This was something my mentor had actually already done previously, but she thought that the data seemed strange because the releasing curve was unusually steady. That's why I redid the tests in order to see if the same results would be achieved, and they were.

Day 19

On this day, the seminar was particularly interesting and focused on producing thin film solar cells. The speaker was from IBM, which I was excited about since I know a lot of intriguing research goes on there. Although the speaker ultimately didn't go into great detail about what their final solution was -- most likely due to copyright issues -- I enjoyed hearing about their research and getting an idea of what they ended up doing.

In lab, I restocked some of the solutions like phosphate buffer and adjusted the pH to various levels in order to soak the silicon wafers and test what results. I also added salt to the phosphate buffer to more precisely mimic the physiological conditions the wafers would theoretically face in a real life application.

Day 18

On this day, I loaded several wafers with drugs to test whether they would actually take to the wafers and what kind of stability the resulting product has. To do this, each wafer had its thickness measured at periodic intervals as the drugs were released in various pHs. The most important pHs to test are physiological pHs because these are the kinds of conditions the wafers would be exposed to in an actual application.

I also tested the spin coater to see how easily PGMA could be added to the wafer. Various rpms (rotation per minute) and rpm/s (rotation per minute per second) were tried out, but it was difficult to get a homogeneous layer. Instead, the wafer would be visibly covered in a non-uniform layer. However, rinsing the wafers in acetone would make this layer disappear.

Near the end of the day, I did some research on two possible drug candidates, polymyxin B and tobramycin, to see if they could be used for this application.