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- Fall 2025 – Awards Abound!Congratulations are in order for awesome research students in the GRAB Lab! Congrats to Gwyn Gagnon '26 for winning the Best Poster Award for the entire Gamma Sigma Epsilon conference that took place in Pennsylvania in October. Congrats to Ann-Lee Coriolan '28 for being selected as a co-recipient of the Catherine ... read more
- Noah Carreiro ’26 – First Semester of Research
This fall marks Noah’s first semester conducting research in the lab, and it’s been an exciting learning experience so far! Recently, he’s been focusing on studying the demineralization process of mouse teeth using lactic acid or EDTA (ethylenediaminetetracetic acid) and confirming the results through infrared (IR) spectroscopy. By comparing the ... read more - Gwyn Gagnon ’26 – Spooky Spectroscopy!
As midterms have come to an end, Gwyn is in full swing in the lab! After a few weeks of trial and error, she has finally found a synthesis method for carbon dots that producing samples that emit different colors of light. Very soon she hopes to separate these carbon ... read more - Ann-Lee Coriolan ’28 – Seems Like There’s a HEATWAVE!
Ann-Lee is starting her first Fall semester incorporating research into her school life. After having a productive summer, there's only a few more experiments left to wrap up the current nanoparticle research segment. Whilst she thinks about more data that could be incorporated into a future publication, she has been ... read more - Lana Dang ’28 – Fall (Spring?) Cleaning
With her sophomore Fall semester in full swing, Lana is definitely experiencing all the highs and the lows that come with doing research during the school year. It is a challenge to find time for lab when classes are so busy. From her work this summer, she learned the importance ... read more - Georgia Kazis ’27 – Evaporation Exasperation
Georgia is starting her junior year at Emmanuel College and another semester of research. While juggling her classes and responsibilities during the semester she is finishing up her last experiments for the project to be published! She has won the battle against evaporation for her IR experiment with a new ... read more - Emmanuel Open House and cool chromatography
This past weekend of an Open House at Emmanuel for interested high school students to check out all that Emmanuel College has to offer. A few students, including Lana, helped out Dr. Ahmad and Dr. Gerdon in a chromatography activity for the families. The paper chromatography was pretty simple, but ... read more - Welcome Back and Summer Research Poster Session
It seems like the State of the Project reports at the end of the summer, and the food safari through Boston and Brookline, was just yesterday. Now we're already into October and the Fall semester is cruising along. So, welcome back to all chemists and researchers! Our semester is going ... read more - Summer 2025 Research Success!
The GRAB Lab group teamed up with Dr. Lau's group for an exciting and fun-filled final week of research. We made the most of Boston by going on an adventurous food safari, sampling Korean corn dogs, Texas tacos, bubble tea, local pizza, and fresh-made ice cream. It amounted in a ... read more - Notre Dame Cristo Rey and Emmanuel team up for research adventure
Two amazing high school students from Notre Dame Cristo Rey High School spent a week as part of the research team in the Gerdon and Lau labs in Chemistry at Emmanuel College. It was a great experience for the HS students and our undergraduate researchers to participate as students and ... read more - Lana Dang ’28 – Trial, Error, and Progress
After much trial and error with the QCM (Quartz Crystal Microbalance) flow cell design, a finalized set up has been achieved! With this new set up, Lana has been able to complete her dynamic mineralization control experiments and is moving on to experiments with DNA aptamers. Hopefully, things continue to ... read more - Georgia Kazis ’27 – High Humidity and Higher Hopes
Georgia can’t believe summer research is halfway through already! There has been great progress with TEM imaging, but she is still trying to troubleshoot IR, fluorescence, and AFM analysis. She has currently DIYed her own humidity chamber so she can do mineralization on the IR, and it seems to be ... read more - Dr. Gerdon – Can I 3D print my experiment?
Trouble-shooting experimental design is an every day task in the research lab. We are always trying to improve our experiments, optimize a parameter, or fine-tune the set up. Sometimes that aspect of research is the most fun! It can be even more exciting when experimental design means actually building an ... read more - Ann-Lee ’28 – Ready to Absorb!
Ann-Lee is ready to ABSORB all this new chemistry knowledge through her time in research. In five weeks in the lab, she’s been researching mineralization of nanoparticles and DNA aptamers. She’s also been using a brand-new plate reader to track absorbance and will soon use gel electrophoresis and dynamic light ... read more - Lana Dang ’28 – Going with the flow!
Going with the flow! It’s already week 3 of summer research! Time moves fast when there are so many things to learn and so many experiments to run. Lana has jumped right into running QCM and collagen experiments and is quickly getting the hang of things. With a focus on ... read more