Work

So it's time to say a little bit about the actual internship I am doing at Trinity now that I have settled in a bit. Trinity hall is a beautiful campus with lots of lovely old architecture. The actual building I work in however, is quite new. It was completed about 3 years ago. The building is kind of wedge shaped. It is called CRANN (I can't remember the acronym but it involves the word nano) My research group has a small lab on the fourth floor. This is where I prepare most of my samples before I take measurements on them. Most of my group is Italian. One of the post-docs is Irish but the Italians have given him an Italian sounding nick-name by changing his last name (Flavin) to Flavinio. There are all very welcoming and lots of fun to work with. So far most of my work has been on spectroscopy. I am looking at a molecule which switches in the presence of UV light. It is pretty cool because you can actually see the solution change from clear to purple after a UV light is placed next to the sample. In oreder to analyze this property in different solvents and see how it affects other molcules I use two machines. One which analyzes the absorption of samples and one which measures emission of the samples after they have been excited with a specific wavelength of light.
This is the view from the lab. Below are the machine I use to take emission spectra with and the box where I carry all my supplies from the lab to the instrument room