Alan Wang, UCSF Week 4-5

Hey everyone,

These past two weeks have been really exciting. I first tried to tackle the random fiber assortment problem by creating a tubesheet design that could be made with the “Othermill” CNC Mill that we have on site at my lab. What’s cool about this mill isn’t just the name, but the fact that the smallest drill bit it accepts is 1/100 of an inch wide at the very tip. This is about a quarter of a millimeter (or 254 microns if you want to sound fancy).

Eric, who works the shop, showed me how to set everything up with the Othermill. I actually breezed through most of the CAD/CAM part, thanks to my experience with Peddie Robotics. The entire machine is about the size of a cubic foot, which is extremely small compared to the behemoth Haas mill that we have back at Peddie. I first milled this cool honeycomb pattern of holes into the back of a plastic petri dish. Ideally, the honeycomb pattern will keep the fibers in an even order with a uniform diffusion radius between each hole, which will hopefully help with the current design challenges.

Only after spending a couple days perfecting the plastic tubesheet/fiber-holder, I realized that pushing 36 of the 200-micron wide fibers through rigid plastic holes wouldn’t be the greatest idea for manufacturing efficiency. Since the fibers are so small and fragile, I had to use tweezers to push them through the tubesheet holes underneath a microscope, which turned out to be both extremely tedious. Even worse, I found out after potting and epoxying the fibers that the epoxy had climbed up the fibers towards the center of the units, meaning that the tubesheet design was probably a wash.

Back to the drawing board, but hopefully with some better results next week!

Comments

Kylie Heering, Week 2 at the Goldstein Lab

We started off our week with a congratulatory acai bowl trip to celebrate Preston’s acceptance into a training grant program. Acai bowls in California top Playa Bowls (no question about it). From what I can tell, its a pretty huge honor to be recognized by this grant, but he’s really humble about it. On Monday, Preston and I decided that testing antibodies that have never been tested on prostate epithelial cells before would be a good objective for my first Western blot on my own. We needed to probe for ASCT2, a glutamine transporter, and GLS in order to determine if their corresponding antibodies are functional. Antibodies are crucial for Western blots because they bind to the protein of interest (POI), allowing for us to qualify its expression after imaging. As such, Preston wanted to make sure they worked by probing for ASCT2 and GLS on three different cell lines. Cell lines are commercially purchased human cells that have been immortalized (modified to grow indefinitely) by telome...

Alan - First Week at UCSF

Hi Everyone! After arriving in San Francisco last Sunday, I spent this past week settling into the downtown Berkeley apartment that I’ll be sharing with Rohit for the next couple of months, as well as learning my way around the Roy lab at UCSF. First day at the lab was really exciting. Here are a couple pictures of the Mission Bay campus, which was completed just a few years ago. Everything is super new and modern, and there’s still construction for other buildings going on around the campus. Most of the people who work at the Mission Bay campus are either professional researchers or doctors/nurses for the nearby hospital. The graduate students take most of their classes at the original Parnassus campus (where Maya is). I work in Byers Hall, which is connected to Genentech Hall and a short walk down the block from the shuttle stop. There are three other volunteers working for the Roy lab this summer – Kimmai, David, and Pujita, who are all undergrad college students...

Wendy Li, Week 1

It is now early July and I have finally started my lab work. I arrived there at about 9 am on the very first day of my lab and found out that there were only two people in the office—Alex, a graduate student in engineering school, and me. “There should be more people in the office, but most of them went to a vacuum workshop today.” Alex told me. My work officially started at 10:30 am when my post doctor Subarna came to the lab. Familiarizing me with all the facilities in lab, Subarna first gave me a lab tour. Meanwhile, he showed me all the basic operations with vacuum chamber, ellipsometer, as well as the spin coater. During the rest of this past week, I was in the process of making my own films. I learned to cut Si wafer into 1*1 cm pieces and clean the surface of these Si wafer with duster and plasma which can effectively clean up all the extra organic particles from the wafer. Further, I prepared 10 percent polystyrene (PS 8000) toluene solution as the material for spin coating. ...

Peddie EXP Summer 2018

Search This Blog