On February 12, 2018, 36 graduate students took on the task of presenting their research in three minutes or less to a panel of six judges to compete for the Vice President for Research Fellowship Program. This year, chemistry graduate student Cody Carrell was one of the 16 participants chosen. In just three minutes, Carrell summarized his research, “Delivering Bacterial Detection to the Point of Need”, that focuses on the major health risk around the world posed by bacteria and food-borne pathogens. Carrell stated that “Unfortunately the current methods to test for these diseases (typically bacteria) in food are expensive, slow, and require a centralized laboratory and trained technicians. We’re interested in developing an easy to use, portable device that can test for bacteria in the field, or at the point of need. The device we developed uses a 3D-printed manifold to house a sheet of paper channels. The paper channels store reagents that are needed to test for bacteria and the 3D-printed manifold lets an end-user add those reagents to a sample without any manual and complicated pipetting steps. We’re currently using our device to test for salmonella, but we could easily modify it to test for many different types of food-borne pathogens, including viruses like the flu. Our device is inexpensive, portable, and easy to use, making it a viable detection method for consumers around the world.”
Carrell will be joining the VPR Fellowship Cohort with 13 other participants who were all awarded with $4,000 in scholarship and travel support. When asked what this achievement meant to him, Carrell expressed that “The fellowship is an important step in my graduate career as it will give me the opportunity to attend international conferences over the next year. Currently, I’m hoping to attend the MicroTAS conference in Tawain in October. I’ll also be attending professional development workshops as part of the fellowship, which will be beneficial when I transition from graduate school.”
Carrell is a second year graduate student who works in the Henry Lab. He is from Oshkosh, Wisconsin and graduated from Carthage College in 2014 with a B.A. in Chemistry. Carrell is a huge fan of the outdoors, and spends most of his time outside the lab going hiking, camping, hunting, and fishing. You may also recognize Carrell from a recent story in the Coloradoan! He is really into Curling, and can be found with other members of his labon Sunday mornings.
The VPR Graduate Fellows Program at Colorado State University was created by the Vice President for Research to support excellence in graduate research and to promote interdiscplinarity at the University by engaging the best and brightest students from graduate programs across the institution. To find out more about the VPR Fellows Program, please click here.
Congratulations Cody!
You can read the full article about this event at SOURCE
