Experience
I have over 5 years experience in various settings where I have developed skills such as:
Bioreactor fermentation
Algal, yeast, and bacterial culturing
Quality assurance and quality control
Drinking water quality assessment
Waste water treatment
Aquaponics/ aquatic systems design
ISO 17025 laboratory standard management practices
Graduate Research
In August 2019 I successfully defended my thesis entitled A Comparison of Viability and Vitality Testing Methods After Bench Scale UV-C and Heat Treatment of the Diatom Thalassiosira weissflogii. (Available here: http://hdl.handle.net/10222/80473)
The project involved growing algae, using UV radiation or a hot water bath to try and kill them with increasing amounts of exposure to the treatment, and then measuring the cultures afterwards with a barrage of viability and vitality testing.
There is a subtle but important difference between vitality and viability. Vitality means signs of life like growth and metabolism, whereas viability implies the specific ability to reproduce. Just as all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares; a cell can be vital but not viable, but never viable but not vital.
My project demonstrated this subtle difference using the two treatment methods. Heat treatment is lethal, and irreversible, because it destroys essential proteins and disrupts cell membranes. Ultraviolet radiation is not lethal and can be reversed, as it is only interacting with the cellular DNA, causing it to cross link in places that messes up the reading and copying of the genes. This cross-linking can be reversed enzymatically in plants and animals with lower doses of radiation.
Phytoplankton, or “tiny plants that cannot move horizontally in the water by themselves”, are a good challenge test case for demonstrating treatment. They pose a significant challenge for waste water treatment as they can be quite resistant to many methods of sterilization, and algae blooms have caused enormous amounts of economic and environmental damage. Applying UV radiation to the ballast water discharged from ships can reduce the risk of spreading invasive species of phytoplankton between ports.
