Week 10 (11/7/22 – 11/11/22): The Tech in S.T.E.M.

This week turned out to be a rather short week as one of the two full days that I could be at lab was unavailable due to Veteran's Day. Because of this, and because we do need Fridays to do part two of transformation (plating needs to occur after 16 hours of finishing part one of transformation), transformation does need to be moved to next week. However, rather than needing to wait until Thursday (as this is the only day during the week that works with my schedule that allows for the 16-hour time-lapse needed for transformation to occur), a lab mate will be able to jump in and help on Tuesday so that we can ideally see transformation happen potentially as early as Wednesday!

In the meantime, this week focused on  preparing for an increase in the team size long for I need to find more efficient processes within the lab, especially as there are more people who will be working with the materials in the lab. I realized that we needed a better way to keep track of inventory in a way where historical record of usage could be maintained and accessed at all times, so because of this devised an easy access way to keep track of a running inventory, one that I could oversee and track, but one that would be easy for others in the lab to use (below is just one way we have been using to keep track of when material was used, and it isn't the most organized method because it is something that could be easily missed, especially because of the transience within the lab itself): 

With my new process, this spreadsheet that I created allows for the input of new inventory, including what it is, where it is stored, etc., And on a separate sheet within the Google spreadsheet, someone could go in and write down when and how much of any item that they used. Because of this, the amount of an item would be automatically updated, as would how long the actual item is okay to use before it "expires." For example, if we were to make LB, we can expect for it to be okay to use for up to 30 days, but after 30 days, we should probably make more (which is where the automated spreadsheet would come in). After 30 days, the spreadsheet will automatically indicate when it is time to get rid of old material and make new ones, as it would not be of best use to our experiments. Other parts that I created to be automated include having numbers automatically update each time someone uses material, rather than having to manually subtract and keep track each time. The automation will also indicate when there is less than 25% of material left, this way we are aware in case we do have a larger portion of a project coming up where we do need more material than what we have already. Below is a snippet of the master spreadsheet that has columns that I created to be automated: 

What was nice about this exploration process was that it still fell into the world of stem and allowed me to be able to explore how technology could be used to help create more efficient processes within the lab, which in the end will benefit when and how much time it takes us to run entire processes, as long as people are willing to log in and update when they do you certain materials and when new ones are made. 

On another note, our small team size will be expanding so that we have hopefully two opportunities per week to run transformations, rather than just waiting for Thursdays (and hoping that nothing goes wrong during the week that will prevent us from running transformation on a Thursday, like contamination, which has been an issue a few different times and which has caused delays in our output as we tend to have to wait a full week later until we can run transformation again). Going forward, we will hopefully have someone who can help to run part one of transformation on Tuesdays, which would be of great benefit as we could run part 2 of transformation (the plating) as soon as we got into the lab on Wednesdays!

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