| John Savage RET 2010: End of Program Reflections
I feel that participation in the RET program during the last 2 years at this stage of my career was extremely beneficial to me and my students in several ways, and was personally very satisfying. I’m certain that the benefits of the RET experience are different for a person with my background and previous research experience (Ph.D. in the field) than for a master’s-level teacher with little or no research experience (perhaps without a masters in the content area, but rather a graduate degree in Education). Based on my discussions with colleagues with such varying backgrounds, it is clear that RET truly is a “big umbrella” program – it can accommodate people with all levels of research experience such that both the host advisors and participating teachers benefit from RET. My personal experience is reflected on in the following paragraphs. The professional development piece was especially valuable since education theory is not part of the standard training one receives to teach at the community college level. Most interesting was the exposure to much of the data that drives many common pedagogical practices designed to revamp or replace the traditional lecture. The training will also help me with the administrative portion of my work at the college, as I can more effectively communicate with my colleagues in such areas as assessment, student services, and academic affairs. The research project in the lab of Dr. April Gu reinvigorated me in a number of ways. First, it made me very interested in research again to an extent that I didn’t anticipate going into the program. It also truly helped me to mentor my own students interested in REU programs. It was very different talking to them about research as a 16+ year old memory than it is now. Lastly, it gave me confidence that I could catch up fairly quickly in my former field of research and contribute concretely to a project. Nehreen Majed indicated that Dr. Gu would include me in the “acknowledgements” section of their most recent publication to which I contributed, which will be very satisfying both for me and the RET program. It will once again underscore the “big umbrella” nature of RET, and emphasize one way in which the host faculty mentor can benefit from an RET participant in his or her lab. This experience also gave me the confidence to agree to participate in a new initiative at Middlesex Community College. If funded (the grant application is pending), I’ve agreed to undergo training to offer year-round REU research projects to our students at the college. Finally, I am more motivated than ever to strengthen the research component of the Coral Reef Ecology course that I teach at the college. This course includes fieldwork in Belize, in which students survey the health of a coral reef utilizing the protocol of the Reef Check foundation (www.reefcheck.org). I will infuse more inquiry into the research component of this work, adding in our own project in addition to the Reefcheck data collection. Finally, the networking that occurred between those of us at the community college level and our grade 7-12 peers was extremely valuable. It helped me to better understand the preparedness level that I should expect of incoming freshman, the highly challenging job that the K-12 teachers face each day, and a better understanding of the impact of MCAS on student learning. In conclusion, I strongly believe that my 2 years of participation in the RET program will help solidify my understanding of the educational challenges we face from middle school through college, strengthen the partnerships I established with other RET colleagues, make me a better mentor for our own STEM students as they purse research opportunities, and continue to motivate me to stay current in the world of science. 2 Summary of Research I was invited to continue working with Nehreen Majed in April Gu’s lab on the mechanism of phosphorous and dissolved organic carbon uptake by bacteria in EBPR processes. EBPR = Enhanced Biological Phosphorous Removal. It is a technique used to treat wastewater by using bacteria to remove dissolved phosphates prior to discharge of the wastewater in surrounding waterways, thus preventing eutrophication of the water bodies. In particular, Nehreen has developed a method that uses Raman Microscopy to measure the uptake of phosphate at the cellular level. For the publication of this process, please see the attached "Majed et al EST 09.pdf" file under the "John Savage Ph.D." link on my RET 2010 Google site if interested: http://sites.google.com/site/savageret2010/. The bacteria then convert the free phosphates and orthophosphates to polyphosphate, which they store as an energy source to later use to uptake volatile fatty acids from the wastewater and reproduce. The occlusion of polyphosphate in the cells, as shown by the Raman spectra, directly correlates to a drop in dissolved phosphate monomers in the wastewater using bulk measurements. (For more information on Raman spectroscopy or EBPR, I've attached my 2010 and 2009 RET research posters under the "John Savage Ph.D." link on the Google site.) Last summer (2009), we worked on extending the Raman microscopy method to understand the phosphate occlusion cycle of the bacteria in greater detail by measuring several different molecules in the bacteria cells (indicative of different points along the cycle). We also looked at the effects of C uptake to produce glycogen, and how this simultaneous process effects phosphate removal. Our spectroscopic analysis from last summer matched the bulk measurements that Nahreen obtained last fall, and a manuscript has been submitted for publication. I can’t comment more on the details of the occlusion dynamics in this forum until the work is published, but it’s pretty exciting. Nehreen received comments back from the reviewers during week 4 of my RET appointment, and one of my tasks for this summer was to help answer the reviewer’s questions, paving the way for publication. This involved theoretical work (library research on vibrational band assignments), acquisition and interpretation of more Raman data, and actual writing of responses. It was very satisfying for me to be involved in the process at this level of detail. I also worked with Nehreen on 2 other parts of the Raman Microscopy project: optimizing biological reactor conditions for the EBPR method about to be published, and most exciting to me, trying out the measurements on real actual wastewater samples obtained from commercial sewage treatment plants that already do some form of EBPR process. (by the way, Deer Island is not one of them – which would be convenient). We made some headway on the first part of the project. I was most useful to Nehreen analyzing the Raman spectra as we collected them, but I did also spend several of the days acquiring Raman spectra for analysis. | |
| The samples from the sewage treatment plants arrived during the 3rd week. It was an opportunity to learn hands-on how Nehreen treats the samples prior to our Raman data collection. I learned (and videotaped) the entire feeding, cycling through aerobic and anaerobic conditions, filtering, disrupting of cells, and transfer processes that occur prior to bulk measurements and Raman. Just like the Raman experiments, it is very time consuming. Unfortunately I am unable to post the video on my Google site via Youtube due to the confidential nature of the process. We also began taking Raman data on the real treatment plant samples. We could observe inclusion of the polymers in the bacteria cells while taking the data. It’s very exciting that Nehreen’s method also works for samples from a real EBPR plant, and not just in her well-controlled laboratory bioreactor. |
