Grad Student Returns from Internship

 

Graduate Student, Janice Duy, was selected as a Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship intern for the summer of 2012.  The award, sponsored by the Department of Energy, gave 20 students from all over the country the opportunity to work at a DOE facility on different fossil fuel-related projects.  Janice worked at the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh, PA, under the supervision of Paul R. Ohodnicki, Jr., PhD, and Michael Buric, PhD, in the Advanced Sensors Development Laboratory.  This group focuses on the design and testing of optical sensors for the quantitative analysis of gas mixtures at high temperature corrosive environments.  During her 10-week stay, Janice worked on modeling the responses of novel thin-film sensor materials and geometries to evaluate their suitability for this application.  The results of this work were published in a conference proceedings paper for SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

Welcome back to the lab, Janice!

Upward Bound

Hey all,

Today we would like to give a very warm welcome to the smart and talented upward bound students who will be helping us out for the next few weeks.

First we have Heidi Ortiz.

Heidi is a senior from Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School. Upon finishing high school, she plans on going to the University of Miami to major in Marine Biology. She is currently doing an experiment on the effects of prolonged light exposure on Antarctic Fungi. Can't wait to see the results!

Next we have Chhayheng Chhoeu, a Senior from Lowell High School. Upon finishing high school, Chhayheng plans on going to college to major in Biology or Premed.

Chhayheng is currently helping Amber out with her study of the Red Tide algae. How awesome is that?

Once again, we here at Connell Lab would like to welcome you both! Here is a picture of a cake to celebrate the occasion.

Horray!

We look forward to working with you!

By Ben Segee

First Place!

Amber Bratcher with her first place poster at the University of Maine Graduate Student Expo

The Connell Lab is excited to announce that one of our graduate students, Amber Bratcher, won first place for the Foster Innovation Center Award for work that best exemplifies innovation excellence at the Graduate Student Expo. 

Congratulations Amber!

Specifically, Amber's work is on the detection of harmful algal blooms. Read more about her work below and here.

SPIRIT: A portable biosensor for the early detection of harmful algal blooms. 

Amber R. Bratcher, Laurie B. Connell, Paul Millard

         Paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) is caused by consumption of shellfish that have fed on toxic algae and is a major health issue worldwide. Low cell densities of dinoflagellates from the genus Alexandrium can produce dangerous amounts of PSP toxins. Toxin and non-toxin producing species are difficult to distinguish morphologically. Current identification methods are expensive, time-consuming, and require special training, thus the development of a rapid, low-cost, easy-to-use device for detection and monitoring would be an important advancement. 

         We have developed a method for detection of Alexandrium fundyense and A. ostenfeldii, two commonly co-occurring species in the Gulf of Maine. Our assay is designed for field-based identification and utilizes a custom-built, portable surface plasmon resonance (SPR) instrument. SPR is a rapid, label-free, optical detection method that measures the change in refractive index after binding (hybridization) of target to probe on a sensor surface. Species-specific RNA probes are bound to the surface of sensors in the instrument, and samples containing RNA extracted from Alexandrium are flowed across the seniors for assay results in as little as 8 minutes. We have verified the specificity of this method using RNA extracted from cultured Alexandrium, and this summer we will test our method in the field with naturally occurring Alexandrium blooms.