S-STEM Scholar Kassandra Barrera's Blog

Wow, what a bittersweet moment. I can say that I have enjoyed my last 2 years being an intern in the TRAIN program for the PC Biosciences Department. Every moment spent here I have learned something very important. Working under Dr. Robin Cotter as my mentor has been an unforgettable experience. Working with her on the microplastics project has taught me so much about how to view this as an emerging issue. I also find myself more efficient working in a lab setting and I have enjoyed working with all of my colleagues that have worked on the project with me these past 2 years. Every single individual I have encountered has made me feel welcome and I have a special connection with them. Another great quality that I am so glad I have gained is, I felt in the past I was extremely shy. This program definitely has encouraged me to get out of my comfort zone, and it has allowed me to get up in front of an audience and present my research. I am super excited to be going into ASU West and to ...

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.

As we are getting near the end of the semester, there is a lot of conferences for my team and me. This week our main focus is the ASU SOLS conference which will be on March 28, 2019. We will be bringing along the new members David and Roberto so they will get to see how these conferences will be because they are going to take a huge role in this project in the Fall of 2019. Giving them this experience now will really help them because it will allow them to see what it will be like when they take lead in presenting in conferences like these.  I am excited about this because it will be the first one we do this semester so it will really help all of us get our feet wet again.

The team and I decided to meet up on Friday and go over a few things all together. We came in and collected the last of our samples Day 28 of our media. We also retreated more plastic disks to start longer trials in the future. However, FTIR is our main focus right now, so since I have that OChem behind my back I have been trying to help everyone as much as I can. I did a bunch of research on the ingredients that are used in our media. I did this because we have been getting some unknown readings in our FTIR graphs and we might think the media could be a factor. Our main focus this week is getting our poster updated with new FTIR images to present at the symposium at ASU Tempe. On Thursday, we will be meeting with Dana and I will show her my findings and see what she might think it means.