Today we decided to split up the shifts for what we thought would be watching the columns drip, however, when Juliana, Riley, and Dr. Sedlacek arrived at the lab for the first shift, they noticed a problem: the samples did not dry overnight and were not ready for a second pass through the columns.
So to make sure the day wasn't wasted, they turned up the heat on the hot plates and decided the clean up the outer room of the clean lab to the best of their abilities. They would have cleaned more, but there were limits because there were samples and random objects that are from different research groups and we cannot verify their proper places in the lab. Thankfully, Dr. John Olesik had some free time and showed Dr. Sedlacek, Juliana, and Riley around the Trace Element Research Laboratory in the same building as the clean lab! After cleaning in the clean lab, the group went down to that lab and explained what he does: finding ways to improve the accuracy of detecting trace elements in a sample to get higher resolution images. He does this by collaborating with many people and using state of the art technology.
Juliana and Riley really enjoyed the tour for two different reasons...
"Seeing how many instruments undergraduates get to play with, get to learn how to use in bigger research institutions and definitely the explanations of the research Dr. Olesik is doing and the passion he has for his research along with the applications of the research because I could correlate it with my own classes." -Juliana
"I really enjoyed all Dr. Olesik was discussing and for me it was really fascinating because I'm coming from a background that's more in the visual range and a larger time scale whereas his research deals with much smaller scales than I would ever have to work with."
-Riley
Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS)
After a really cool tour, they headed back up to the clean lab and that's when I came in to take over for the second shift and found out about the hot plate issue. At that point in the day, we couldn't do anything except wait for the samples to dry so we called it a day for the lab work. After that, we split ways and Riley went back to the hotel for a nap and Juliana and I went to the Columbus Museum of Art.
The museum was amazing, to say the least. The overall architecture of the building was very aesthetically pleasing with a lot of natural light to guide our way through the galleries. We saw the special exhibits: A Dangerous Woman and Shakespeare in Prague along with the rest of the galleries.
After the museum, Juliana and I stopped at a French bakery (Pistacia Vera) for macarons and browsed a shop in Columbus' German Village (Caterina) before heading back to the hotel to get Riley so we all could go to Akai Hana for dinner.
Hopefully tomorrow everything will be set so we can still do some analysis on the mass spectrometer, but no matter what, we're going to make the most out of the lab time we have left since we head home on Friday!