Week 1- I've always dreamed of being a [wire] stripper

I had my research orientation on May 28th, which included meeting my research group and many others both familiar and new. Many friends who had stayed here for the summer told me Blacksburg was nothing but a ghost town, but in the auditorium of the Fralin Life Sciences building, it sure didn't look like it.



I was also impressed at how friendly people were. I've had my fair share of awkwardness in large groups that already know each other, but in this setting, someone pressed the reset button. Everyone was on the same unknown page, and it was great to have that opportunity to comfortably meet so many people with a shared interest again.

My first day in the lab started off with a meeting with Dr. Ruder, my project mentor. The guy's one smart cookie with a heck of a resume: B.S. in civil/environmental engineering at MIT, and eventually a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. During his post-doc years at Boston University he worked with James Collins, considered one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology. He completed his first year here as an associate professor in BSE this year. Did I mention he's only 33?

 He explained to my fellow Scieneer Sean Hardy and me what we would be doing in the ten week span in the context of his research. He said we would be developing unique individual projects, and when he said the job was "more than just pipetting things," I knew I was in the right place.

But since the job was more than just pipetting, it included other concepts unfamiliar to me. But walking into the unknown is part of the experience, too. Dr. Ruder gave us this week to familiarize ourselves with the beginner electronic kits in his lab, so that we could better understand his projects.

One of our final products looked like this:

Nah, I'm just kidding, this is more like it:

It all felt like playing my Lego sets all over again, minus the pain from stepping on them. The manual provided basic information on capacitors, resistors, transistors, and LED lights, and from someone who knew nothing about electronics, I can say I learned something. We made a circuit like the one above, a working loudspeaker, and a few other toys. Other techniques, such as wire tying and stripping, came eventually as well.

Soldering was the hard part, although the most fascinating. It involves the joining of two metals by means of a third metal with a lower melting point. The third metal used to be made of toxic lead, but has been replaced by almost 100% tin material. When heated, the soldering iron instantly melted the tin wire, which we placed between the two wires. When we pulled the iron back, the liquid formed a solid in less than a second. Not only that, but the synthesized joint, when done correctly, could not be pulled apart by force and still conducted an electric current. I would solder myself a suit of armor if I had more time. Either way, soldering has more industrial/mechanical applications than I can count.

Dr. Ruder gave us a few papers to look over, one of which I cannot discuss. We'll be taking  elements from his research to implement in our own projects, mostly in synthetic biology. I'll post again this week once I have a clearer idea of what I'm doing.