A few weeks ago Team BREATHE presented to members of the Library and Gemstone for our library award. This award is given to the three Gemstone teams who showed the best use of library resources. This was an amazing opportunity to share our research and learn more about some of the other Gemstone projects! Special thanks to the Library for giving us this generous award, and to our librarian Dr. Svetla Baykoucheva!
Today was an exciting day for Team BREATHE as we collected our first root samples, starting the first phase of our research! We traveled to three biowalls in the area (Horace Mann Elementary, Monarch Academy, and United Therapeutics) and with the help of one of our partners at Furbish Co, Jason Reed, we collected samples of plant roots to begin our Hyphomicrobium spp. data collection. We are already beginning to analyze these samples, and hope to find some exciting results soon!
Our LaunchUMD funding campaign started bright and early today at 5:00 am, receiving the first 1% of our goal by 12:30. Also starting today, we are going to be 'those' people on social media, endlessly posting and promoting our campaign and our research. While we may act a bit like pests, we have a good reason. The Launch campaign will help pay for our growing laboratory and equipment fees. If we reach our goal, we may even be able to attend conferences to network with people in our field and learn from experts from all over the world. The link to the campaign is https://www.launch.umd.edu/project/2020. Hopefully, our social media posts will spread the link far and wide so that we can reach our goal by the end of the month! Speaking of conferences, two team members attended our second conference these past two days. We even presented a poster (see below) on biowalls and what we are planning to do in our research. The poster was received well, no question went unanswered, and we were even able to network with some industry professionals and potential consumers. With so much going on, it's been impossible not to feel excited about our project, hopefully the Launch donors will feel the same way!
The good news just kept coming this week. We received news about more potential funding and about a potential research collaboration with an on-campus biowall. The potential funding comes in the form of a Launch UMD campaign to start on April 5th. Two of our team members have already started planning our advertisement video, and the whole team is pumped to be able to wear our Team BREATHE t-shirts to host a booth at Maryland Day. The Launch campaign will be a great way to advertise our research and get our project out there while simultaneously attempting to pay for it. The other great news is that a biowall will be going up in our very own McKeldin Library this fall. Some of our team talked to the man behind the project this week and discussed involving the biowall in our research and possibly applying our research results to it in the future. The wall will be installed by our very own industry expert, Michael Furbish, and our team is looking forward to collaborating with the library, Furbish, and other students to liven up the library with our very own living wall. An added bonus to this week is that it brings us to spring break. Rest assured, our team still has some tasks to complete on this week off, but it takes a little effort from all of us to ensure the good news doesn't stop here.
This week was a big week for Team BREATHE. The snow delay may have set us back 2 weeks, but as of this week we are officially approved to start our research. We rocked our proposal presentation and smoothly answered all the questions thrown at us. Just today we started plans for the first steps of phase one: getting the air and root samples. Due to some of our proposal critiques, we will probably be taking air samples from another building besides STAMP, possibly something that's new construction and would probably have more VOCs. We also started choosing dates for our biowall root sampling trips, but we need to get some lab materials in before we finalize those plans. All these research plans require funding though, which makes this next bit of news even more exciting. Team BREATHE was notified this week that we will be receiving funding from UMD's Sustainability Fund. Shout out to Nicole, our financial officer, for being the driving force behind the application. We now have the means and the methods, so although all the proposal work is behind us, the real work is probably yet to come.
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AuthorTeam BREATHE and their adventures. Archives
May 2016
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