My first one a half week at David Rittenhouse Laboratory was
extremely exciting. I arrived at 20 S 36th St at 10 AM sharp on
Friday, June 2nd . It took me 10 minutes to find the laboratory
because the building was so big. It comprise of the whole Physics and Astronomy
Department and Math Department.
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| A corner of the lab |
The lab is very spacious with 2 rooms, a main room and a
side room used for chemical experiments and analyzing data. The main room has
several furnaces for graphene growth and work station of the grad students and
post-doc in my lab. Although the lab is pretty big, it can get pretty crowded
as there can be up to 16 people in the lab at a time.
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| Side room |
On the first day I met Ramya – one of the senior grad
student in the lab and Vinayak and Emillia – both are undergraduate students. On the first day, we learned about graphene
growth and graphene transfer as well as the time schedule and dress code of the
lab. At around 12, people scattered to grab lunch. There were 3 food trucks in
front of David Rittenhouse which offered a variety of food. Later in the afternoon,
we had our weekly lab meeting with Dr. Johnson. Every week, people present
their new data set and ideas with the rest of the lab. There are 3 big projects
going on in the lab so it’s a chance to see new ideas about Material Science.
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| One of the project in the lab: Vapor sensing using Carbon Nanotube Field Effect Transistor |
My PI, Dr. Johnson is a very interesting person. Outside from the actual lab meeting, I had the chance to talk to him in person for about an hour and a half. He was a swimmer so he knew about Peddie swimming and described them as "fearsome" back in the day. He also recommended me several physics books taught in honors classes at Upenn though I'm not sure I'm able to handle them. He offered a lot of insights into science, career and just general life experience that I find really helpful in the upcoming college-apply season. I hope I get to talk to him again.
The next
week was pretty busy. I got assigned to work with Ram Gona – a 2-year graduate
student and Mark Zhao – a post-doc. I’m pretty lucky because I have two
mentors. The project I will be working on is TMD-based field effect transistor.
Specifically MoS2 and WS2 bio-transistors. They sent me 2 review papers and 3
scholarly articles to learn the basics of TMDs and FETs. It occupied like 2/3
of my time reading those articles since each is 20-page long.
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| MoS2 under miscoscope |
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| Defected MoS2 with multilayered structure. |
Mark and Ram will guide me through the steps of growing MoS2 crystallines, transferring them onto a chip and even making the chip themselves to I'm very excited. I will be sent to training for Atomic Force Microscopy next week and I need a PennID for that. It took so much time finishing the paperwork that the whole first week I was preoccupied with getting a PennID
Other than lab time, I spent time
hanging out with some of my friends from Peddie who are kind enough to visit
me, reading and venturing the city. Special shout out to Christos and a special someone for visiting me. As for reading, I'm starting on Lolita (for summer reading) and Nicomachean Ethics (for fun). My apartment is in the
middle of everything so it’s pretty convenient exploring the city. I ventured
out a lot to try the cuisine and I had the best burger I’ve had in a while at “White
Dog café” – definitely recommended. That’s all I have for this week, bye all.
Sounds like a great start. You should try those Honors Physics books - You may surprise yourself! Maybe we can go to White Dog when we have our EXP lunch. Good luck with your microscope training next week!
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