Tunable Membranes

My time with the Aizenberg group at the Wyss Institute/Harvard SEAS was spent developing a novel bioinspired membrane technology that received the TechConnect National Innovation Award for in 2016.

By modifying the surface of a membrane with a stable oil interface, these liquid gated membranes can be tuned such that feed selectively passes through the membrane depending on the nature of the liquid-liquid interactions at the membrane surface and the transmembrane pressure. I was supervised by Jack Alvarenga and Dr. Mughees Khan of the Aizenberg group for the duration of my internship.

Although my primary responsibility involved developing a data infrastructure for quantifying the performance of the membranes, I was also responsible for maintaining a small cell culture for use as a biological feed source and presenting a research update to Prof. Aizenberg and the rest of the group at the end of my internship.

The experiments and data acquisition pipeline I developed laid the groundwork for the continued development of the technology and continued to be used in my absence. A summary of recent developments in the form of a research update will appear in the Oct 2018 issue of APL Materials.

Supervisor Comments: Chris is an extremely hard-working and humble individual who I trusted to complete the many tasks involved with his project (hardware/software integration, filtration feed maintenance and characterization, and data collection/analysis).

In his time here, he learned many new skills, including maintaining a live yeast culture for his experiments which often required a high degree of planning and a slightly irregular schedule, and mastered others with which he had previous class/co-op experience (programming in LabView and MATLAB). He managed to work independently during most of his time here, while taking the opportunity to ask inquisitive questions and seek advice on troubling issues or results. He was very diligent in maintaining a log of his progress and experimental plans based on our discussions. His documentation and results will be used well into the future as this project continues after his departure. From the beginning of every day to the end, he always brought a good attitude into the lab and was a pleasure to work with