Ecology

Hello everyone,
I'm Baninder Baidwan from Southern High School and I will be a senior coming this fall. My PI is Dr. Justin Wright in the Biology Department, however the majority of the time I will be working with my mentor, Jenny, in the French Family Science Center. My lab is working on finding the effects of plants on soil microbial communities. My project will focus on two methods that sterilize soil, autoclaving and gamma irradiation. Autoclaving in simple terms is just baking the soil and gamma irradiation is putting soil in the microwave, but with different wavelengths. So, I will try to determine which method is more effective in sterilizing soil.

This first week has been really exciting. Before starting the program I imagined myself just sitting in a lab doing boring stuff, but I was proven wrong. I took part in a variety of interesting and fun things. The first day I started with helping an undergrad measure the surface area of plants and the mass of plant roots. It was pretty neat because all the technology we used made me feel like a scientist. On Tuesday I helped Eileen, another grad student, make containers that she designed that will collect/store the gases given off by the plants. Making those containers involved a lot of physical work, but it was fun, because it was the first time I got to work with big cutting machines and other equipment I never saw myself using. Later on in the week I went to a stream with two grad students and one undergrad, to help them collect sediments that they needed for their research. It just so happened that when we got about half way through our process it started raining. We couldn't leave, because the students needed the sediments that day. Luckily, I was standing under a big tree that saved me from getting drenched. Although, we all got wet, the positive side to it was that we finished our task and had a great amount of fun while doing it. On Thursday, I helped out some undergrads do their job. I evacuated the atmospheric air out off these really small, cute bottles and put in Nitrogen gas. What made that exciting was that it involved needles and I had to use a timer so each bottle had the same amount of gas. Friday I had to make this solution using agar to make agar plates for my project. Agar plates provide the environment in which bacteria form, so using agar plates in my project will allow me to see if bacteria still form even after sterilizing the soil. While making the solution I tried not to breathe, because the agar was malodorous. I ended up having to make the solution twice because the first time my mentor and I added to much water. I had a great amount of fun during this first week and I can't wait to start another week of my internship.