Week Two: Conducting My First Sensor Experiment!

Hello, and welcome back to my blog!

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of beginnings. I recognize they are important, but I usually don’t like the first week of anything new because you don’t know what to expect, which I guess is both a good and bad thing. For example, my least favorite week of the school year is the first week. During those starting days you don’t know your overarching schedule or a general idea of how your weeks are going to be yet because you’re still in a transition period to get used to that schedule. Thus, I always go into them with some degree of anxiety. However, now that I’ve finished my second week out of traditional high school classes and navigating my internship life off campus, I feel more “at peace.” Navigating the unknown is also a huge part of science, so I feel like it all ties together.

Despite not being in school every day, I still hang out with my BIM friends. I try to maintain a good balance of working at my internship and socializing with friends every week. I think this [skill? practice? you get the idea] will help me in college because for the next four years of my life, I will have to actively carve out time in my schedule to hang out with friends.

Speaking of transitioning into new routines, I think I’m slowly getting the hang of things at my internship – meetings and the lab work are starting to make more sense :). In addition, I finally have lab access, so I can scan myself in and out of the lab and conduct experiments. On Thursday, I got my hands wet and did my first Acid MIP Fabrication. It definitely wasn’t perfect, but it was a great learning experience. I essentially prepared the o-PD electrode surface the PFAS molecules will absorb (adhere to a solid surface) onto. The analogy that was described to me was creating Swiss cheese, and the tiny holes are where the PFAS would fit into. My coworker also helped me start a new section in OneNote to be my lab notebook, and I wrote down the entire procedure of my Acid MIP Fabrication, helping me reinforce the steps in my brain as well. I will finish the sensing process next Monday. A picture of my lab setup is below.

(Fiona Xu)

I talked about this briefly in my abstract, but I realized I should probably give another more in-depth introduction to PFAS and the exigence of creating methods of detecting and remediating them (i.e. sensors) in nature here on my blog. PFAS stands for per- or polyfluoroalkyl substances and are synthetic or man-made compounds found in items such as firefighting foams, waterproof cosmetics, paint, and food-packaging. PFAS are nicknamed “forever chemicals,” so when PFAS enters our waterways, they will take a long time or virtually never breakdown; this is due to their strong carbon-fluorine bonds. The longer the chain, the harder to breakdown, but even shorter chains pose a problem.

As for the project I’m interning on, other than PFAS being a threat to human health and contaminating our waterways and drinking water, traditional methods for detecting PFAS like Liquid Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) are highly efficient, but they’re also expensive, cumbersome, and not user-friendly, meaning it requires help from experts. On the other hand, cheap, portable, and user-friendly sensors often have low sensitivity, so without getting too jargony, MITRE is working to find the middle ground. We want the sensors to detect as low of a concentration of PFAS as possible (ppt or parts-per-trillion concentrations) to meet EPA regulations.

If you want to learn more about PFAS, here is a link to a video about the Minnesota PFAS incident publicized last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8qGtEVh7oQ (Bloomberg Originals). It notably included the trial to pass Amara’s Law: a PFAS ban named after outspoken PFAS activist Amara Strande. Strande was diagnosed with a rare form of liver cancer after exposure to PFAS and unfortunately passed away before the passage of the law.

This week for my independent research, I continued compiling and started reading those sources regarding the Potomac River’s general characteristics and current PFAS contamination. Most of my sources so far have been annual waterway reports and journal articles. Finding sources proves difficult sometimes because I’ll click on a title thinking it’s about one thing, but then when I read through it it’s actually about something completely irrelevant to my topic. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to find a good number of sources by referring to the citations of papers from the EPA. While I read, I take note of the important bits of information related to my research topic. Next week I plan to look more into how sensors or similar technologies have already been used to clean waterways.

See you next week,

Fiona

Citations

Ajasa, A. (2023, July 14). She died fighting ‘forever chemicals.’ they still linger in her town. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/14/pfas-forever-chemicals-cancer/.

Rehman, A. U., Crimi, M., & Andreescu, S. (2023). Current and emerging analytical techniques for the determination of pfas in environmental samples. Trends in Environmental Analytical Chemistry, 37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.teac.2023.e00198

YouTube. (2023, November 9). The Forever Chemical scandal | bloomberg investigates. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8qGtEVh7oQ