On June 24th I flew out to Copenhagen, Denmark to work on my bioplastic for five weeks. Throughout May and June I was working with Pond Biomaterials on coordinating the three different labs I will be experimenting in to work on improving my glucose yields at Novozymes, purifying and polymerizing my lactic acid at the University of Copenhagen, and breaking down the duckweed cell walls at the Technical University of Denmark. It is absolutely beautiful in Copenhagen and it was very cool meeting Martin, the CTO of Pond Biomaterials, in person who I have been communicating with virtually for the past two years going on weekly calls!

So far I have worked one week at Novozymes and it was honestly an absolutely incredible week. I worked 9.5-11 hour days so we got a lot done, starting with a small scale liquefaction and saccharification procedure on the duckweed to release and convert the starches, and then once we got glucose did this on a much larger scale with hundreds of grams of duckweed. We had to be innovative with some of our experiments (eg creating insulation for a water bath using aluminum foil and towels shown to the left)! 

We ended up doing two large scale batches and by the end had doubled our glucose concentration results. Our final concentration of glucose was nearly 6x greater than results I was achieving previously in the lab large scale so this was exciting. We then moved on to fermentations where we did small test runs, measured the optical density using a photospectrometer, and experimented with buffers. Our large scale fermentation will run over the weekend so fingers crossed we get high lactic acid concentrations!

My gratitude for everyone at Novozymes definitely needs its own section as my experience has been made by the people. I have been working with Ulla Rosenberg everyday, as well as with Kim Borch and Robin Dorau. I can barely begin to express how kind and welcoming everyone was and what a wonderful culture there is at Novozymes. We all went to a dinner on the seaside on my third night in Denmark and truly everyone is amazing.

As always, there were many failures / bumps in the road that I wanted to share as research always comes hand in hand with surprises. A few of my favourites were when the centrifuge pressure was too high and the bottles our samples were in imploded; when our glucose solution took 4 hours to filter and therefore needed to be put in a pressure filter unit in a brewery lab; and when our heating source for our solutions stopped working so we went to the store and bought our own!

Back over my Christmas break I worked on creating silver nanowire substrates on a flexible translucent material for my solar cells and this month I received the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscopy) results. They look great and there are so many fibres all over the surface! This was so exciting as this material has never been experimented with before and our deposition method proved to be quite effective in creating evenly distributed, conductive electrodes for flexible solar cells. I am hoping to continue building out the idea in August at TMU.

Through Pond Biomaterials I had the opportunity to have a one pager on my bioplastic displayed at a fashion event by Denmark’s leading fashion designer Henrik Vibskov. The event had participation from the Danish political elite, the Danish Chamber of Commerce and the organization Biosolutions. You can check out the one pager here!

Kristina and I released a new episode of The Curiosity Podcast with Léonard Boussioux who is an incoming professor at the University of Washington in the Information Systems and Operations Management department, and a previous Ph.D. candidate in Operations Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

We discuss how Léonard decided to pursue advanced mathematics and physics in university, his new focus of developing predictive and prescriptive methods to enhance decision-making in sectors such as healthcare, agriculture, and climate, and the data he deals with across these sectors. We also go over the significance of multimodality in order to maximize potential from data sources. Listen to the episode here!