S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

This evening I had the opportunity to attend the 17th Annual URSA Major Awards. I was nominated by my amazing mentor Dr. Robin Cotter. It was a very bittersweet moment because I realized that I will be graduating from Phoenix College and moving on to ASU for more bigger and better things. Two years working by her side has really taught me a lot about who I am and what my goals are.  I also got the great opportunity to share the stage with Amanda, and Maria which I will really miss working with. It was such a great feeling getting recognized by this award. I am forever grateful for everyone in my path that made this possible.

This week we have been getting everything organized and we are trying to get all of our samples analyzed. Something Exciting this week is that we got the opportunity to use the SEM again and we were able to analyze some of our Pseudomonas aeruginosa  samples which were really promising. These images are only preliminary so we will need to need to take our controls to see what we are seeing is actual biodegradation.

This past weekend Maria and I went to Yuma, Arizona and we attended the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences Conference on April 6, 2019. We were lucky enough to present our project and poster, and we ended up winning first place! I am so proud of all of my team members and extremely grateful for my mentor Dr. Robin Cotter, for always pushing us to our full potential. I am extremely proud of all my team who helped put our poster together Amanda, David, and Robert. It is nice to be leaving PC and having this win for our team! Now we will be getting ready for the Metro Tech Conference and hopefully gathering more new information by then.

These weeks have been going by so fast I feel like. It’s already the beginning of April which means there is a lot of conferences around the corner. We are specifically getting ready for the Arizona/Nevada Conference this weekend in Yuma. We have done a new poster really showing our new important I formation which is FTIR. FTIR has really become a very crucial part of our research so our focus is really leaning towards that and this instrument will really show us very crucial information towards our hypothesis that Pseudomonas aeruginosa can biodegrade microplastics.