Portolio of David Elkan-Gonzalez

On my first day at BAMM Labs I met my lab partner and was handed a paper by my boss.  The paper was on the capture of cells on a glass slide. The two of us were told to develop a novel procedure to selectively capture and release blood cells on a thermoresponsive surface. BAMM Labs focuses on micro-fluidic devices, and the idea of this project was to create a small, cheap, and portable device that could be used to easily diagnose various bloodborne ailments in limited resource settings. I had recieved an internship here as part of my gap-year experience between high school and college, and my partner and I set about our task with great enthusiam. While we would spend much of the next 6 months working very closely with each other, my partner and I only met with our manager about once a week.

We didn't have a wealth of lab experience and lacked much of the background knowledge needed, so we immediately began researching similar procedures. I had a lot of fun learning how to use the laser cutter, and quickly became the most most silled person in the lab at operating the korean software. We recieved very little guidance and for the most part developed this process through our own research and through repeated experiments.

Despite many challenges after 6 long months we succeeded in developing the procedure. Using a thermoresponsive coating we trapped anitbodies in laser cut mircofluidic channels. By flowing blood through the channel target cells are captured by the antibodies. Once the cells have been captured we flow through marker antibodies which latch onto any captured cells. These anitbodies are modified to be more easily detected