Carbon nanotubes, hybrid photovoltaics, quantum dots or nanoparticles? Of the 800 labs I could choose from at Yale, it came down to these four. Which lab to choose? I didn’t realize it would be so easy to get in contact with professors and learn about their research!
I’m taking a class called Perspectives on Science and Engineering,” a course dedicated to emerging scientific discoveries and research. Every other week, Yale professors deliver presentations on subjects that have ranged from Lung Regeneration to Quantum Computing, Immunobiology, the Higgs Boson, and many more. At the end of the year, the course provides freshmen with a stipend of $4200 to conduct research in the area of their choice at a Yale laboratory.
When looking for a summer lab, I first went to my Faculty Advisor, Prof. Steve Girvin of the Applied Physics Department, to discuss a list of potential professors I could work with. These included: Prof. Chinedum Osuji, Prof. Lisa Pfefferle, Prof. Minjoo Lee, Prof. Jung Han, Prof. Mark Reed and Prof. Eric Dufresne.
I emailed the professors and within days, received a response to schedule a meeting from each one. Each time I saw a professor; we talked for over an hour about their research, its applications, and potential projects I could do during the summer. It was such a great experience to learn about why they found their research so exciting (detecting changes in concentration equivalent to a drop of Coke in a pool) and what they do in their free time (building vacuum tube amplifiers!) The professors even gave me a personal tour of the lab, introduced its members and were really keen and open to taking on undergraduates.
In the end, it was Prof. Dufresne’s nanoparticles and colloids that swept me off my feet! His research group has developed “optical tweezers” capable of applying forces to colloidal particles. This summer, I will be working on glass, polymer and metallic nanoparticles in Prof. Dufresne’s Soft Matter Lab using the funding from Perspectives. I’m really excited to be working with nanoparticles, as I hope to pursue Nanotechnology as a career in the future.
Check out some of my following blogs containing Scanning Electron Microscope images of the nanoparticles I have learned to make in the lab!