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Sonal’s Lab Notebook

Sonal Rangnekar

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I 💜 museums so much, and @cooperhewitt in NYC is a new favorite. Got to spend an afternoon nerding out about the ways in which science, art, and design intersect in these exhibits. Swipe ➡️ to see some of the highlights! 1) Handcrafted insect models 🦋🐝🐛flutter inside glass jars. The movement is triggered by body heat, which means more fluttering when there’s a lot of people in the room. Kinda makes sense 😄 2) Data visualization of disease progression - a more somber piece in which the artist tracks her daughter’s bruising patterns through beautifully colored petals 🌹 3) Babylegs - an ocean filtration system that uses children’s sheer leggings👖 to capture micro plastics. It’s scary to see the sheer quantity of plastic that floats around in the ocean. 4) A morbid favorite - the cotton funeral suit that contains fungal spores to accelerate decomposition and natural recycling of the body 💀.

🎃Happy Halloween everyone!👻 Here’s a throwback to one of my favorite DIY costumes. My name is Diana Francis Taylor (call me DFT) and I'm your neighborhood quantum mechanic! I'm great at putting together the elements of the periodic table (my favorite element is berkelium of course). Give me a call if you have a band gap that needs a tune up! Keep it safe this Halloween, and don't let your friends Position and Momentum get in an Uber together. It's illegal in every state (stationary or otherwise) for them to commute! /puns

Thank you to everyone who voted on Facebook! My science art won second place in the social media competition and will be displayed in the NUance user facility, which houses the SEM I used to make this image. So cool to see the art at this scale 😍

Anyone else just trying to stay afloat this month? ⛵️I think it’s fitting that #worldmentalhealthday is in October, because this is always the most stressful month in grad school. I have no words of wisdom about how to get through October, except that I’ve learned to acknowledge how bad it is and be extra nice to myself this month. For example, I’m not going to feel bad that I’m making this World Mental Health Day post a day late 😅 Be nice to yourself, too.

This quarter I’m a teaching assistant for a Quantum Mechanics course! 👩🏽‍🏫 I’m a little nervous since this is my first TA experience, but QM is my favorite topic and I’m really excited to help students feel less intimidated by the subject. There’s a lot of beauty in quantum, and I’m going share some of my favorite stuff on this page as the quarter progresses. 🤓

First day of 20th grade! It’s crazy to think I’m a fourth year PhD student now, especially because this is the least stressed I’ve felt in this entire program. I should be on campus today to introduce myself as a TA for a Quantum Mechanics class, but I’m hanging out downtown for the CHiMaD annual meeting. With views like this and a summery breeze, I’m not complaining 😁

Taking a break from dance to spend some quality time with 🖨 bae in lab this Sunday 😄 I’m printing a vertical electronic device for the first time, and it’s going waaaay better than I thought it would🤞🏽Which is a good thing since this is my day job and field of expertise #aerosonaland

My heart is so full 💕 It was an evening of nonstop dance at @csaffestival with this incredibly photogenic squad. The thrill of performing for an enthusiastic crowd has me on a high that’s hard to come down from 🤩 The highlight of the night was hearing how our work touches the lives of others. 😇 We dance to satisfy our souls, but also to connect with others and bring them joy. Thank you to @gopiengineer for making this possible and to @csaffestival for having us. We can’t wait to be back for next year!

That Friday feeling✨✨✨So pumped for an evening of dance, movies, and FRIENDSHIP 👯‍♀️👯‍♂️ 📷: @ditiboy

“SUNRISE ON LAKE MICHIGAN” . I scienced an art! 👩🏽‍🔬👩🏽‍🎨 Vote for my image by liking the FB photo at the link in my bio! 😇 My PhD research focuses on printing 2D materials to make next generation flexible electronics. Here's a fun peek at some graphene nanosheets that I printed for a biosensor project. I used my favorite characterization method, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), to get a closer look at how the graphene sheets were stacking, and this watery scene emerged (it's false color btw; Photoshop is my bff). There's no scale bar on here unfortunately, but each of the graphene sheets is about 100-300 nm long and less than 10 nm thick! I've been doing SEM for 6 years now, and it's my favorite technique because it allows us to see the tiny structures that we think we're making.

First day back in lab after 6 weeks of writing and it actually felt good to get back in the swing of experiments! So many small things have changed in my absence, from colleagues cleaning up their bench spaces to a change in our centrifuge tube supplier 🧪 😂

It’s the last week of August and my summer is just getting started 🌞 I’ve got a lot of ideas for what I want to share on this page, a road trip in the works, and so much dance that’s spilling out of me. Here’s to the next chapter 🥂