After a whole two months of waiting for HPLC results, we finally got the concentrations of the lactic acid produced from duckweed which was very successful! We produced 1.53 g of lactic acid from 2.5 g of duckweed (60.7% w/w glucose) which was a big step for the project. You can see the HPLC below with the large lactic acid peak! The next step is scaling up to do the protocol with a large amount of duckweed, producing lactic acid, and then moving into polymerization. The person supervising the project did leave the lab so I am having to figure out getting into a new lab currently, but fingers crossed that we have a bioplastic soon! Thank you so much to Dr. Avis for all your support & help with this!

Something else I started working on in January was volunteering with the Light & Hope Initiative, an organization working on bringing equal opportunity to students in Nairobi, Kenya to get quality education. I have been working with the founders to build out a two pronged program; the first part will be a speaker series where we bring in speakers on issues of the students' interest and the second part will be bringing in people to host interactive workshops. 

We successfully ran the first workshop a few weeks ago where I brought students through an idea sprint on hunger in rural India. We did a root cause analysis on the problem, looked at existing solutions and based on the main problems we found, and pitched our own solutions. Next week we'll be bringing in someone to do a programming workshop!

Kristina and I released some very exciting episodes over the past two months! The first was with Jennifer Francis, the co-founder of SheBoot and an angel investor. We talk about what factors most determine a company's success, how startup ecosystems are created, and why she co-founded SheBoot. 

Our other episode was with Thusha Agampodi, who is the Director of Engineering at Aurora Solar, a cloud-based solar platform that uses data, automation, and AI to make solar projects simple and predictable (where she leads 5 engineering teams!). We discuss what goes into building an engineering team, how to manage personalization and simplicity when building systems, and approaches to allocating resources in terms of talent, budget, and time in tech projects.

Over the last few months I also spent a lot of time researching for my solar cell, with specificity to the new substrate I'll be working with, which will be translucent paper (as opposed to my previous plan of willow glass which shatters very easily). I have been in depth researching spray coating as a cheap and effective method to coat layers onto my solar cell and have also been looking at organic photovoltaics. This has definitely been a learning curve for me and I'm excited to test out the ideas in the lab.