After many years of planning, the ACS Northeast Regional Meeting happened (or, I guess, is happening as I type). NERM 2022 was supposed to be NERM 2020 before COVID-19 had something to say. The bad news is that the symposium I had planned on 3D printing more or less fell apart as many of the speakers I was able to recruit in 2020 had moved on and were not interested in presenting this year. Still, I came away from the symposium with some very exciting ideas about 3D printed functional materials that I cannot wait to try out in the lab.

On the other hand, the good news is that one of my newest students, Kashane Miller, was able to present her summer research for the first time in a professional setting.

Kashane’s summer research is on using a home-build turbidity meter to study nucleation kinetics. She is developing an experiment that uses student-built instrumentation to explore chemical phenomena. Her work is interesting in useful because it shows that we can reproduce literature results on the nucleation kinetics of calcium oxalate and mimic the results from a commercial instrument. Further, she demonstrates that the custom built instrument can help students understand the role of data processing – in this case using a low pass filter – to improve data quality. She has also discovered that we need to rethink our overly simplified sample holder, since the data now have this unexpected dependence on the volume of liquid in the sample cell. (We are probably getting reflection and refraction effects from the round vial.)

So congrats, Kashane, on a job well done.