TRAIN Scholar Jonathan Wisman's Blog

      Oh my goodness, my business is at an apex, or I hope at least. The 21 credits I am enrolled in this semester decided to get feisty all around the same time so I have been in battle mode to say the least. It's been a good experience in that it has helped me to decide to turn the credit dial down next semester.      This week has been defined by a few things for TRAIN. The first is the poster presentation this Saturday for the Arizona Nevada Academy of Science annual meeting. That has translated into a lot of practice sessions and going over the poster we had printed this last week. I am very excited for the opportunity and the judging brings a level of anxiety, in the best way possible. In addition to that I continued to work on my rough draft for my research paper. Its always fun, and slightly tedious, to go back through and translate all of the notes and different aspects of research to one paper. I have enjoyed it though as it is such an important aspect of being involved i

      It has been a very busy week in light of the upcoming Arizona Nevada Academy of Science annual meeting next week. I was able to complete the poster with some other team members and am very excited for the opportunity to be able to present. That took up a lot of my time over the last week.      In addition to working on my poster I had a decent load of lab work that I needed to take care of. We had some issues with some experimental controls and the team decided to redo samples and filtrations of water samples from the five stages collected earlier in the semester. That translated to a couple of late lab evenings where I ran 400ml through a vacuum filtration process. After which I allowed them to dry for 24 hours and dyed them with Nile Red. The team and I will be counting those filters tomorrow and I am excited to see how the counts go.       Finally, I have been quite busy this week with school stuff as well. It feels like that time in the semester where everyone is starting to

      This was a productive week for a few reasons. To begin, I was able to dye the rest of the filters, with Cassandra, from every stage of the waste water treatment process. This set us up to get a count of the micro plastics from every stage.      I also was able to attend an online abstract workshop and learned quite a bit. With that information fresh in my head I sat down and completed an abstract for the upcoming Arizona-Nevada Academy of Science annual meeting where I will be presenting a poster about microplastics and the chemical contaminants identified last semester some of those might have potentially been carrying. I am excited for the opportunity to get out and share what myself and the team have learned so far.      Finally, I also had to create some new sample-salt gradient solutions in which I will be will be filtering next week. We had some control questions with out current filters and it was warranted to redo a part of the process to ensure we had the highest quality

     After a much needed break it is time to turn it into high gear. I feel like I haven't been able to give my research as much attention as I would like due to a high class load, my fault, but am really excited for this.       This week we tried to dye our filters from the different stages of the wastewater treatment plant with nile red. However, the dye seemed off so we had to make another batch of nile red dye that should be ready by tomorrow. I will be coming in and dying our filters so that we can get them under the microscope and counted.       I was also able to gather most of what I needed for the electrocoagulation trials and am waiting on a last couple things but will be full steam ahead on that as well. I'm very excited to get some data and see how everything turns out.      I was also offered a position with the University of Montana for their research program this summer. The focus will be ImmunoToxicology and the effects of environmental factors, particles, and m

Electrocoagulation, that's what! This has been a big week for my project moving forward. I was originally tasked myself with looking into ways to effectively remove microplastics from our water and thought reverse osmosis might be the best process to test. However, through further research and conversations I stumbled upon a process called electrocoagulation.  This is essentially a process in which you run a high voltage current through a water source using an aluminum cathode and copper anode. What happens is the free forming electrons and metal ions cause the dipoles of the plastics and other contaminants in the water to attract to each other. This in turn causes them to coagulate and create a sediment and floating mass of all the junk in the water making their removal easy. This has been an exciting development for me as it seems to be a plausible way to add to the wastewater treatment process if it is effective.   While this has caused there to be a delay in me starting the pro

     Traveling to the wastewater treatment plant was exciting this past week. Having been to the sample collection site before, I walked some of my colleagues through the different stages of the treatment process. In addition to the collection, I was able to have some very beneficial conversations with people who work in the water industry. This allowed me to gather some information about what other techniques are in use for wastewater treatment. This wealth of information will assist me as I create a project focused on possible solutions to our microplastic problem. I want the solution to be as plausible as possible.  Lastly, I met with a mentor this week and have scheduled some meetings with other professors in the science field to solidify further how I will get my project done. It has been a very productive week, and I look forward to diving into the samples gathered and beginning to run my experiments.