A lot of my time lately has been put into online pedagogy! Here’s a lab that we used to do in person; I did it as a remote lab with my summer gen chem students in late July.
I made a summary video which you can view on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/OVhkISG5FRQ
Here’s the lab protocol I gave students.
On October 4, I was privileged to be part of a panel at Griffith Observatory’s “All Space Considered.” In the video below, our panel discussion starts about 43 minutes in.
The panel was convened in honor of a new Vox Media series, “Glad You Asked.” The first episode, which aired a couple of days after the panel discussion, was about colonizing Mars, and the scientists featured in the video were part of our Pilot Valley study.
Now, I’m not in the video (I was teaching when they made the last excursion to Pilot Valley), but if you watch the video, you’ll see Evergreen student/ Bond lab research group member Camille!
We normally fly under the radar here in the Bond research group, so these opportunities were pretty unusual!
I’m posting from the 2019 Astrobiology Conference in Bellevue, Washington.
Even prior to attending this conference, I had decided that I was going to start focusing my research efforts primarily on my astrobiology projects. Going to this conference has been very exciting and informative. Because of what I’ve learned, I’ve added more dimensions to my Europa project, which I have rebranded as HyPerICE (Hydrogen Peroxide In Cold Environments).
I have started drafting a grant proposal and will post more information in a few months!
The collaboration with ORCAA is going great! My students have been collecting air quality data approximately weekly for about five months and are looking for correlations between air toxics that are easy to quantify (e.g. particulates) and those that are harder to quantify (e.g. acrolein and other highly volatile organic compounds). The students recently presented their work to ORCAA staff and will be presenting their work at EPA Region 10 headquarters at a time TBD (sometime after the government shutdown ends).
I’ve done a bit of method development work on the Europa project over the last six months and am just about ready to apply for a SURF student for next summer to carry the work forward.
I currently have three projects running:
(1) A collaboration between the Olympic Region Clean Air Agency and The Evergreen State College to measure carcinogens in wood smoke that involves two students. The TESC half of the project involves method development, testing, and validation, while the ORCAA half is trying to measure these chemicals in Thurston and Mason counties and potentially link them to health issues.
(2) Environmental Redox Project, a continuation of what I did at St. John’s, which you can read about in this previous post. I currently have a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow, T. Christensen, working on this project.
(3) Europa Project–again, a continuation of what I did at St. John’s. I don’t have a student for this project yet (on purpose!) as I am trying to fine tune methods.
Dr. Bond is partnering with ORCAA on a grant to evaluate toxic organics in wood smoke. We are currently looking for students to do method development/optimization for acrolein and possibly formaldehyde detection. Please contact Dr. Bond for more information.
I’m Robin. I came to the wonderful world of academia as a non-traditional student and now I’m a non-traditional professor!
Educational Background:
The short version of the story is that I got my B.A. in chemistry from California State University, Los Angeles (in 1993) and my Ph.D. in chemistry from Colorado School of Mines (in 2015).
There’s a longer version of the story. Let’s just say that when I applied for grad school and people asked for records from all of the previous institutions I had attended, I had to send in five transcripts. I did many wonderful things between graduating with my BA and enrolling in grad school sixteen years later. Many of these were educational (though absolutely very few of them left a paper trail) and all have shaped the way I interact with students and scientific research.
How I developed my research interests:
Thanks to my unusual background, I also have a variety of research interests. My interest in contaminated soils was kindled when I started gardening at my first home which was located just 1/2 mile from a Superfund site. My interest in remediation stems from the disaster preparedness education I used to do in conjunction with the city of Sunnyvale, CA.
I love method development because I’m a “tool girl”–I love using power tools at home and I like finding the right tool for the job in scientific research, too.
I’m interested in research at the intersection of geology, biology, and chemistry because that’s what I did in graduate school. For my dissertation research I looked at factors affecting hydrogen peroxide kinetics in natural water systems, which meant measuring hydrogen peroxide production and decay in everything from local streams contaminated with agricultural runoff to the middle of the Pacific ocean. Although I did geochemical characterization of field sites, the most important factors seemed to be biological in nature; thus, I also spent time growing microbes (algae and bacteria) and looking at how they affected their environments, chemically speaking.
Finally, I’ve been interested in extraterrestrial life since I was five or so—that’s the age at which I decided I wanted to study astronomy when I grew up. When I was a teenager, my goal was to become an astronaut. When I was a young mom, I frequently dragged my kids to events at SETI headquarters in Mountain View. Needless to say, when I was offered the opportunity to help a friend on her astrobiology research, I jumped at it. I was originally brought on in the role of mineralogy consultant, but I also helped do a lot of the fieldwork. I still collaborate with my friend (Dr. Lynch, currently at Georgia Tech).
Put all these experiences together and you get a person with two main research foci–remediating contaminated sites and the potential for life on Europa, an ocean planet–and a strong interest in method development.
Dr. Robin Bond (formerly Schneider) currently teaches environmental and analytical chemistry at The Evergreen State College. Dr. Bond is in the process of setting up her lab at TESC where she will continue her work in environmental redox chemistry. Please check back for open research opportunities in a few months!
The projects described below were initiated during Dr. Bond (Schneider)’s years at St. John’s University in Jamaica, NY. Students’ whose names are in bold presented posters on their research.
Europa Project
Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is a prime candidate for finding extraterrestrial life because of two factors. Firstly, it has a lot of water (potentially more than is found in Earth’s oceans). But life in its ocean could not be too much like that in terrestrial oceans, because the ocean is covered by 60 km of ice! Unlike marine microbes on Earth, the microbes at the base of a hypothetical Europan marine food chain could not rely on photosynthesis as an energy source. Instead, the source of their energy might be oxidation-reduction reactions spawned by the second factor that makes Europa of interest to astrobiologists: an abundant source of hydrogen peroxide.
The goal of this project is to examine hydrogen peroxide kinetics in a modeled Europan ocean and determine how they affect the redox cycling necessary to sustain life. Eventually we will have model oceans with extremophiles from Earth, but that is several years in the future.
Past research students: J. Mirkovic, L. Palisoc.
Gowanus Canal Project
It’s easy to predict how two chemicals will interact in a controlled laboratory setting. Environmental chemistry is a lot of fun precisely because there are hundreds of substances involved and it’s not always clear what is going to react with what.
This project examined redox cycling and metal mobility in a waterway contaminated with both toxic metals as well as recalcitrant organics—and, more importantly, what might happen when if the equilibrium were upset by trying to remediate the system. Our field site, the Gowanus Canal, is shown in the header picture above.
(Now that Dr. Bond is working on the opposite side of the country, she is looking for field sites that are more local. However, she hopes to be able to continue her work with the Gowanus Canal as it is considered the most polluted waterway in the USA.)
Past research students: S. Johnson, A. Peck, L. Diawara, N. Cacarmo-Ortiz