Because I was on my March Break I got to do lots of lab work without any school timing restraints. I worked with Lactobacillus bacteria to produce lactic acid from my duckweed's simple sugars, which was a success! This was honestly a bit of a surprise (I was expecting months of failure, like the starch phase) but was very very exciting!

For the production of lactic acid I learned how to observe and count microorganisms moving around under a microscope to get the optimal amount of bacteria in my simple sugar broth. Huge thank you to Mr. Avis, the microbiology professor I've been working with, for all your help :) I then did a purification protocol - esterification and hydrolysis - and over the next week will be running HPLC and NMR tests to test the purity and make sure we have the right products. If all goes well, we can move onto polymerization, the final step, next month! 

I was very honoured to have been selected as one of The DMZ's Woman of the Year recipients this month! Alongside a group of incredible other women leaders, this award recognizes women from the Canadian tech ecosystem for their contribution to creating impact. At the conference I got to speak on the kick-off panel alongside Lucy Ho, the founder of Hackergal, moderated by Lisa Lisson, the President of FedEx Canada. This was an inspiring discussion and overall just such an amazing experience!

In my last newsletter I mentioned starting The Knowledge Society's PIE Challenge, where we were given one month to come up with a recommendation deck to accelerate Shell's shift to carbon neutrality. My team and I created a recommendation deck to repurpose old oil rigs for platforms for offshore electrical substations to eliminate decommissioning costs and increase economic viability of wind energy, causing a $4.65 million reduction in decommissioning costs. 

This was very difficult and out of my comfort zone because it was so economics-heavy and it took late night calls and hours of work everyday, but we submitted and were selected as a top 5 team! Next month we will get to pitch our idea to an executive at Shell for potential implementation. I learned so much from this experience and had a ton of fun PMing the team.

Ecological anxiety is becoming increasingly prominent as the effects of climate change worsen, and I loved getting to have a conversation about how to combat this at The Walrus Talks at Home: Youth and the Climate Crisis on March 15th. I gave a 5 minute talk and spoke on a panel alongside Tina Oh, Ashlee Cunsolo, and Justin Langan. Thank you to Jennifer Hollett and Alice Stratford-Kurus for inviting me! 

Three years ago, for my school science fair, I created a sticker intervention to decrease cellular screen time in teens by an hour per person day. The year after, in the eighth grade, I created a screensaver to further decrease students' screen time by two hours per person per day. A few months ago when I got the opportunity to work alongside an editor to write a paper on my findings I was super excited to go back to one of my first ever projects! Getting to write a paper was such a fun experience! You can check out my paper published in the CSFJ journal here.

This month I got a blog post published on Voices of Youth, UNICEF's digital community for youth. I wrote about my project leveraging duckweed for 3D printable bioplastics, and how, to address plastic pollution, we must reinvent the way in which they are made to create a circular plastics economy. Read the piece here!

Over the past month I have been working on the release of the sequel to my novel, "Chronicles of Illusions: The Blue Wild" which placed #4 on Amazon's magical realism bestseller a week ago! I am planning on releasing my sequel hopefully in May or June and am currently working on getting a blurb for the cover. I will definitely be posting updates on my media platforms + these monthly newsletters!

Kristina and I released two more episodes of The Curiosity Podcast this month; the first was with Rachelle De Muy, a strategy specialist for Deloitte’s Workplace Experience team in Montreal, Canada, and the second was with Dylan Gambardella, recently named Forbes 30 Under 30 and the CEO and Co-founder at Next Gen HQ that creates a hub to cultivate the community, education, resources, and mentorship that entrepreneurs need to keep pushing forward. Give them a listen and let us know what you think!