Skip to main content

Kyle Sikkema - Nearing The End


You could hear a pin drop in the Lab the week of July 4th; It was quiet week but a productive week for
me. Almost everyone was out for vacation and celebration, but the calm gave me the time to advance
my primary literature reading, helping me analyze our experiments from another angle. I watched
firework shows in town and attended a few car shows. Freedom was in the Michigan air on the 4th
(displayed below).


This past weekend, I also went to another signature car show that is held annually in downtown Ann Arbor.
They closed off 3 busy streets and filled them with cars ranging from antique automobiles and modern
sports cars. I was most impressed by this firetruck red late 2nd gen camaro stock car.


Beyond the cars, I have a huge update on my laser experiment. This week, Grace and I focused on
realigning the optics setup to eliminate the back reflection of the laser that was being projected from the
two ends of the rubidium cell (wrapped in orange heat tape and supported with white electrical tape, in
picture below). After essentially disregarding the back reflection information, which was not what we
were looking for, Grace and I found a small signal on the data graph from the Oscilloscope (O-scope).
The O-scope takes in light and reads the intensity of the electrical signal as time varies in the experimental
setting. Finding the small signal on the data graph was a eureka moment, for we had finally found the
“scattered light” from the rubidium and laser interaction! Half of the battle with this experiment is obtaining this signal,
and we finally have a reading that has been deemed valid by Grace’s confident reassurance.
Fueled by the excitement of our breakthrough, I translated the results on my poster for EXP night!





^Here’s a picture of the rubidium cell through a night vision scope on the left. The bright green areas are from the
laser light. On the right is the cell as it ordinarily appears. Both are pictures of the same thing.
After logging the data translated by the O-scope, Grace taught me about magnification with lenses
(valuable physics knowledge), and explained the importance of amplifying or minimizing a signal to one’s desire.
Next week is my final opportunity to collect rich data and make adjustments to finesse our setup and
continue changing variables for adjustments/developments in the signal of the scattered light. Grace is
nearly done digesting and interpreting the French paper. Research takes time, and you must be dedicated
to diving into analysis to advance your approach to the problems you are trying to solve.
Also, Mr. Bright completely surprised me last week by paying me a visit at my lab. He had hinted to me about
his possible visit soon, and I was completely oblivious to it! He gave me the most genuine surprise visit of my life,
and it was a blessing to see him in Ann Arbor. I gave him a tour of the lab and we went out to lunch with Alex Baum.
Unfortunately, Mr. Bright had to catch a flight in the early afternoon, so I didn't get a chance to show him everything,
but I was so happy to see him and excited to share my experience with him. Shoutout to you CB, you're the man.

It’s hard to believe that my time in Michigan is almost over. I have made so many new friends in the lab,
on the court, on the streets, and even in the grocery store. Stay tuned for the grand finale this Friday.

All good - KRS.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
1 comment
Read more

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. ...
Post a Comment
Read more