Author: harrison

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New Publication!

We are happy to announce that our work on using deep eutectic solvents has now been published in Analytical Chemistry: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.2c03980 This work was done by Jessica Torres, a doctoral student in the lab, along with Karen Campos and undergraduate student currently in the lab.

Fluorescently labelling amino acids in DES

This work explores how one can do fluorescent labelling in deep eutectic solvents (DES). Our goal for this work is to apply DES to the analysis of amino acids in the search for evidence of past extraterrestrial life. But the implications of being able to do the direct labelling of analytes in a DES mean that those solvents could be useful in more sample preparation methods and still allow for the routine labelling reactions to be undertaken

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HPLC 2022 Poster Award

Congratulations to Jessica and Karen for winning one of the HPLC 2022 Best Poster awards for their work on “Novel fluorescent labelling of amino acids for detection of past life via CE-LIF“.

Photo of the list of poster award winners.
Oops, we were back at the lab when the awards were announced

We are very excited that they were recognized for this work, particularly given it was a conference on column chromatography, and they are doing capillary electrophoresis based work. We hope to have the paper out for review and publication later this summer.

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Harrison Lab Featured on KPBS

Jessica being interviewed by KPBS

Recently Thomas Fudge, the science reporter for KPBS got in touch with us about the research that Jessica is doing for her NASA funded research project. He was interested to learn about how we are going about developing the means to search for chemical traces of past life on Mars, or other planets.

So we were happy to have Thomas and his videographer/photographer Matthew Bowler come by and record materials for their feature on work.

You can see, read, and/or listen to the feature here.

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Publicity of our research

Our NASA funded research looking for ways to detect chemical traces of past life has gained interest once again. The SDSU NewCenter wrote up a nice piece on the work that Jessica, and now Karen, have been undertaking on this project. The work is also featured on the College of Sciences web page.

It’s great to see the hard work of our research team getting the recognition that they deserve.

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Book Chapter on Active Learning

Book on teaching analytical chemistry
New Approaches to Chemistry Teaching

If you are at all interested in learning more about active learning, or teaching a flipped classroom, particularly with an emphasis on analytical chemistry courses, you may want to check out a new ACS book: Active Learning in the Analytical Chemistry Curriculum

The book is a collection of works from the leaders in analytical chemistry curriculum developments, including Dr. Harrison. His chapter is a collaboration with Dr. Elana M. S. Stennett on how to develop a flipped classroom and to tailor it for analytical chemistry instruction.

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SDSU 2021 Research Highlights

We’re very proud that Jessica Torres’ research project was featured in the annual compilation of SDSU Research Highlights.

Jessica was awarded a prestigious NASA Fellowship award which will support her research efforts throughout her pursuit of her doctoral degree. Jessica’s project focuses on developing new approaches to searching for chemical traces of past life on rocks on other bodies in our solar system. The challenging project will further enable NASA’s goals of exploring and understanding the conditions for how life can arise in the Universe, and if life has existed elsewhere.

Jessica and Chris

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SRS 2020

Celebrating a succesful SRS

Friday was SDSU’s annual Student Research Symposium (SRS) where grads and undergrads from across the campus present their latest research/works. It’s always a great opportunity to see the broad range of excellent research on display.

The Harrison lab was very well represented with posters from Cat, Arrion, Madee & Adrian, Jessica, Davis, and Muhand & Paola!

Most, but not all the group in one place for a change.

It was great to see all the interest in the work that the students are doing, and the new potential for collaborations that came from all the discussions with other researchers.

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Congratulations Adrian!

We’re very happy to announce that another lab member has joined the IMSD supported team of students in the lab. Adrian now joins Madee and Cat in the program. It’s a great honor to have so many deserving and promising young scientist in the lab, and it is encouraging that the IMSD teams sees, and wants to support, their potential as well.Adrian sitting on a bench

Adrian Colazo
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A new toy for the lab!

New CE-LIF Instrument

Thanks to our friends at NASA/JPL we now have a new, powerful, instrument for the lab. Peter Willis’ group kindly donated an older CE-LIF instrument that they were no longer using to us. The instrument will greatly enhance our lab’s capability to do sensitive detection, opening up more avenues of research.

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The Harrison Lab at SciX 2019

Last week (Oct. 13-17, 2019) part of the Harrison Lab took a trip up to Palm Springs to present some of their research at the annual SciX conference. SciX is a great conference for the group, both as it is just the right size to have a lot of great science presented and not be overly packed, and also because it serves at the annual meeting for the AES Electrophoresis Society (Chris is currently VP of the society).

Adrian presenting his cIEF poster to a fellow conferee.
Madee with her poster from her summer Brazil REU program.

So this meeting provided us with a great opportunity to present our latest research, and to catch up with colleagues from other universities and to learn from them. Jessica, Adrian, and Madee each presented posters on Sunday, during the opening mixer, and in Monday’s AES poster session. Arrion presented her poster on Wednesday, in the environmental analysis section. And Chris gave a talk on CE separations in one of the Tuesday AES oral sessions.

Arrion with her THS analysis poster.
Jessica presenting some of her non-JPL research.

All in all it was a great time, and capped off by the SciX Wednesday night Gala “A Night at the Oscars”, where everyone was dressed to kill, and Madee got the dancing started in style.

The lab members on the red carpet heading into the Gala.

Chris also coordinated a Sunday morning SciX bicycle ride, which is something far too few conferences have on their schedules.

Chris riding past one of the many wind turbine farms around Palm Springs.