12/1/2007 - We were awarded TSGC Fall Semester "Top Design Team" scholarship! Thanks to everybody who has helped us and will continue to help us through next semester!
11/19/2007 - Fall 2007 TSGC Design Showcase - Yesterday, we went down to League City, Texas to participate in the 2007 TSGC Design Showcase. After an exciting day of listening to interesting projects from teams around Texas, we received the Best Poster, Best Oral Presentation, Best Written Paper, Best Patch Design, and 2nd Best Project Model Awards. Congratulations to all teams for a great design showcase! Thanks again to all of our mentors and collaborators who helped us so much!
11/6/2007 – Update meeting with all of the collaborators and project mentors to discuss the upcoming TSGC conference and a reasonable timetable leading up to it. Nanoshell samples are finally available for the use of the instrumentation team to characterize behavior of their systems.
10/31/2007 – A lot of work is being put in to get Cycle 1 deliverables done. Our whole team is on site to edit everything we’ve got from timetables to the background/literature review. We’re behind schedule on labwork because our collaborators have been pretty busy.
10/26/2007 – The team delivered a technical proposal presentation to the rest of the bioengineering design class. We got some constructive feedback from our peers…
10/19/2007 – Submitted TSGC Level 2. Our team feels ahead of schedule on paperwork due to the overlap between Level 2 and in-class deliverables. From here forwards, more labwork for everyone.
10/15/2007 – TSGC Level 2 is due this week, so this will be a big time commitment from everyone! The instrumentation team managed to get some ideas from the last meeting onto the protoboard. Testing is done on gold colloid standards, and yields measurable absorbance readings. The machine works! We still need to see if it would work with actual nanoshells, though.
10/11/2007 – Meetings with Dr. Mark Pierce and Dr. Adrian Wang at Rice yield the instrumentation team a lot of information and ideas for the construction of the optical device.
10/10/2007 – Both arms of the team work hard in lab. Instrumentation team is already pretty savvy with Labview and the NI protoboard on which the instrumentation design is to be tested. Nanoshell team continues working on the time consuming nanoshell synthesis process.
10/3/2007 – We fulfill the Option II area requirement by making a presentation to Dr. Alma Novotny’s immunology class offered by Rice’s own biosciences department. We received a lot of questions from the 90 person class, so there seemed to be a lot of interest in the project!
9/27/2007 – Submitted TSGC Level 1. Whew. Nanoshell team begins work in Dr. West’s lab to synthesize nanoshells for the project.
9/25/2007 – We begin work on the TSGC Level 1. There is pretty significant overlap with a lot of the stuff we have had to turn in for class, and so we don’t feel as overwhelmed as we were by the literature review.
9/21/2007 – Work on the literature review and background documentation is under way!
9/20/2007 – Kai Chu is a new team member! Meeting with our project mentors and TAs enabled us to gain a decent view of a starting point for the project. A Q&A session enabled us to gain a lot of insight into the background behind the nanoshells that are to serve as the ‘core’ of this diagnostic method. We also split the team into a nanoshell team and an instrumentation team in order to efficiently tackle both arms of our project.
9/13/2007 – The team decides to go forth with both TSGC and BTB projects. With this comes the submission of our TSGC Level 0 abstract. Confirmation from Ms. Mullins from the main office tells us we’re on board!