I just want to say how grateful I  for this opportunity. I’m so excited to present my poster and tell everyone about my research. I honestly wish I was here much longer. This has been a lovely environment to learn and grow, from the beautiful buildings to wonderful staff and faculty. This experience has opened my eyes to multiple opportunities. My favorite things was talking to the bus drivers, specifically the Greenbriar route. They were so nice about when I was still figuring out how the routes worked. I will also miss the 6th floor on Fondren library. I really liked the research I was doing and it made me aware of how problematic PFAS are. I plan to use these skills to use the skills I learned in the next lab I work in. Hopefully I will be presenting my research at another symposium. I also want to thank my mentor and PI for allowing me to use the resources in their lab. I also want to thank Dr. Faiza Zafar for organizing this, and creating such opportunities.

So this week I returned after the hurricane. I was trying to connect remotely before I arrived to check on my experiment. Come to find out that my computer wasn’t connected to the internet and the ethernet cable wasn’t working. It was eventually resolved but I had lost a whole day of work. On Tuesday, I checked on my experiments and needed to run another on. All of the nodes were full and I and the wait time were terrible. I would submit something in the morning  and it would only start running at 10pm at night. One time I had submitted something, waited the whole day just to find out it only ran for 5 minutes. There was something wrong with the dump file and we had to rewrite that line of code. The issue is I had to cancel the other five I had running. At one point while waiting for my trials to run it said that nodes were exhausted and would had to wait even longer for them to run.  I also recently discovered the 6th floor of the library, which had been such a wonderful place to write my abstract and work on my poster. I honestly wished I had went there earlier as it is very serene and has such a great view out the window.  I felt rushed this week since I lost one due to the hurricane, but I have been managing. I do feel nervous as we get closer to the end but I know I’ll be ok.

This week I really couldn’t do any thing due to the hurricane. I was worried that due to the power going out, any experiment I had started the weekend before, I would have to rerun it again. With the power being out I couldn’t even work remotely. Since my phone was still charged, I just read some articles about forever chemicals. I found an interactive map about the levels of PFAS in the United States. I also learned that along with new EPA regulation there is new legislation about the production of PFAs in about 11 states. I was looking at things like this because there is a lot of disconnect between the sciences and law. It also motivated me more in my research as it gives it even more purpose. It shows that the public is also aware of this and is wiling to do something about it.

This week I joined onto my mentors one-on-one with his P.I. He mostly talked about the results he had and the concerns about his experiment. His P.I. suggested some adjustments like removing the vacuum that he had and to surround the COF with water on both sides. It was nice to see how critique can be applied to improve the experiment and clear confusion. His P.I. also told me that I’m going to switch the direction of my research question. Instead of looking at the diffusion rate of the PFOA into a COF, I’m going to studying the type of adsorption that happens when the PFOA is inside the COF. This is still inline withe the photodegradation of PFOA, as the COF is a heterogeneous catalyst. This means that PFOA has to stick to the surface of the catalyst in the reaction. The PFOA either physically adsorbs with the hydrophobic tail or chemically adsorbs the hydrophilic head. So I’ll be running experiment with different environments and seeing the effects. This is different from my earlier question as I was collecting quantitative data, but now I will be focusing on qualitative.  My mentor said that I could do both if I wanted  but to make things easier I can just do this. It’s also been cool trying to modify the 3D models of the COFs just so I have 1 pore in the center and adding all of the layers. Quantum ATK can be really fun to use, but I still need to understand it more.

This week I’m still studying the COFs I’m going to be working with. At the most I’ll be working with 8 and they all have photo catalytic properties. This is different from last week as I notice mix and matching the knots and linkers is difficult as a lot of the COFs don’t have one that is most prevalent. I show how we’re going to study COFs. I first had to download that particular and then arranging to where the pore in centered in the unit cell. Then I created a layer on them and added a wall of water with a singular PFOA anion in it. I submitted that to nots and it took 3 days to get the results. I then calculate for the diffusing of the PFOA anion.

This is the animation of the anion, the water wall and the COF layer interacting This week I also went on a field trip to the Sugarland water plant. It was cool to hear about how wastewater is treated and the process behind make drinking water out of that. I asked the manager about PFAs and he said the current solution is using reverse osmosis or using uv light for the removal of them from water.

This week, I practiced how to build different compounds  within Quantum ATK, submit them and extract the specific data that I need. I was mostly finding the mens square displacement which intern find the self diffusivity of the compounds I was working with. I did experience a hiccup when an essential function on Quantum ATK just disappeared . I had to first ask my mentor, who then had to call another person to come and look at it. They were able to fix it by editing this obscure line of text within the computer. As annoying as that was it made me want to learn more about the program that I’m using. For practice the week I put methane, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide and if boxes and found the mean square displacement. From that data I find the liner regression of the data points and use they to did the self diffusion rate.  That done using this formula.

I looks complicated but we have already found the important stuff so all we have to do is divide by 6.Untitled This is a video of the methane molecules moving around in a 2.16*10^5 Armstrong cubed box. I’m now looking at the types of covalent organic frameworks and looking at the nodes and linker of them by combing though a huge data base of  over 1200 COFs and finding the most common ones.

This week was mostly orientation and getting myself accustomed to my work area. Tuesday was very informative on what research is and how I need to conduct myself while during this time. They also talked about the challenges that I might face while researching and how there isn’t one way to do things. I learned what my peers will be researching as well, which definitely peaked my interest. On Wednesday there was an orientation for general lab safety and biosafety which was interesting  because  biosafety training isn’t as emphasized or taught. I feel like I was more engaged with that training because the risk can be greater with biohazards or at least there is a proportional response to a chemical hazard in comparison with a biohazard. A lot of the information I learned involved topics I learned in Biology II. While this was important to know, I found out that the training might not apply to me as all of the testing I will be doing are simulated on the computer.  I’m started learning some of the basic commands need to use unix which is an operating system that linux is based on. It reminds me of learning any programing language but I don’t have to go too much in depth.Instead of working in a lab I will be running simulations on the computer to study the electronic structure of an atom and molecules. I will specifically be studying pollutants PFAs also know as forever chemicals and how to absorb them from the water as well as degrade them using heterogeneous catalysis. I just know that it is a lot of chemistry involved, but I should be able to adapt. This week I was also able to watch my mentor do a trial run of presenting his thesis, which was exciting because I see my future in that and I can use that I as en example when I present my poster in August. All in all this week was pretty cool and I’m excited for what I’m going to learn this summer.