Nt13101 Unit 3 Research Project

My first research experience started when I participated in bone scaffold designing project at the Cooper Union in Spring 2012, under the supervision of professor David Wootton at Cooper Union Department of Mechanical Engineering. The purpose of this study was to design and manufacture bone scaffold for orthopedic trauma, especially for segmented bone fracture. I worked with a senior mechanical engineering student who had been conducting the research as his senior capstone project. The first task was to test manufacturing efficiency of two different types of polycaprolactone (PCL) with different average molecular weight. I concluded that the low molecular weight PCL is more convenient for mold-casting fabrication, due to low viscosity, while the high molecular weight PCL has an advantage of being mechanically stronger than the brittle …show more content…
In this project, I am performing experiments to chemically characterize Korean rice wine. I started this project, not only because I love rice wine, but also because I thought that this project could bring my academic interest and my Korean culture together. I procured monetary funding of $1,000, along with a monthly batch of rice wines, from Boksoon Doga Rice Wine Company in South Korea. Specifically, I am performing multiple experiments to characterize farnesol, a 15-carbon compound that is reported to have anti-tumor property. With two undergraduate students that I am training, we purified the rice wine and the fermentation product (acquired using the fermentation starter used at the winery) and performed thin-layer chromatography, high-performance liquid chromatography, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to calculate the concentration of farnesol. Future experiments are planned to isolate the farnesol using monoclonal antibody and to perform tissue culture to verify the effects of farnesol on cellular