For the past month and a half I worked on the TKS "PIE" Challenge where my team focused on repurposing old oil rigs for platforms for offshore electrical substations to eliminate decommissioning costs and increase economic viability of wind energy. We were selected as one of the top four teams globally and I got the opportunity to pitch to a variety of people at Shell, from the AI manager to the general manager of commercial innovation. This was an incredible experience and Shell is currently reviewing our deck for potential implementation!

This month I have been heads down writing and working on my book, "Chronicles of Illusions: Bound by Dreams". I did three full proofreads, got a book blurb for my front cover, and have been collaborating with an amazing illustrator for the cover design which I will definitely be sharing in my May newsletter! The book is set to release in early June so stay tuned and you can follow along with my writing progress on my socials like LinkedIn and Twitter :) If you haven't read the first book, you can find it here!

My transparent and flexible solar cell concept has been in research phase for a while but I am very ready to bring it to a proof of concept which I am hoping to start building out over the summer. This month I received a small $1k grant from the 1517 Fund, a venture capital firm backing founders at the earliest stages of their careers and companies, so I'm looking forward to putting this to use to buy some of the nanomaterials I need such as my silver nanowires!

Over January and February I developed my first machine learning algorithm from scratch to predict the output of photovoltaic systems using parameters such as humidity, snowfall, precipitation, cloud cover, and shortwave radiation which had a mean absolute error translating to 79.71% accuracy. I entered this into the Ottawa Regional Science Fair and ended up being chosen as one of the top 10 projects to advance to the Canada Wide Science Fair which I'll be competing in next month!

Badminton is something I've always loved playing and April was a month full of games. I played in two Ottawa District tournaments up a level to the seniors section (grade 11-12) and ended up placing 2nd in one tournament and 4th in another. Getting back on the badminton court was great and I also finished off my volleyball season so there were lots of sports practices everyday which was a ton of fun!

Progress with my bioplastic was a bit slow this month because I had to be reliant on equipment / machines to run tests in the lab on my lactic acid which took long periods of waiting due to various test malfunctions. I am planning on doing a full lab protocol in a few days to isolate my lactic acid via distillation and will run a few more NMR and HPLC tests to ensure I have enough lactic acid at a high purity percentage, so fingers crossed that everything goes well and I'll be able to move into polymerization in May. If not, I'll have to go back a few steps and see where things went wrong. Lab research is for sure teaching me patience and resilience!

Kristina and I released some podcast episodes with some incredible people this month! The first was with Jennifer Wagner, the President of CarbonCure Technologies. CarbonCure chemically repurposes captured carbon dioxide during the concrete manufacturing process to make greener concrete, and was the grand prize winner of the 2021 Carbon XPRIZE. Our podcast episode with Jennifer was also reposted by Carbon Cure's Twitter page!

The second episode was with Mark Papermaster, the Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice president of Technology and Engineering at AMD, the market leader in microprocessors. Give these a listen to learn something new from both amazing guests!