Author: Ashlyn DesCarpentrie | Major: Chemistry
My name is Ashlyn DesCarpentrie, and I’m a junior undergraduate majoring in Chemistry with minors in Mathematics and Biology. This past spring, with the help of the Honors College Research Grant, I’ve been conducting research in Dr. Robert Coridan’s materials science group in the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department of Fulbright College.
The overall aim of my project is to develop a method of patterning gold (Au) that is cheaper and more efficient than the conventionally used photolithography. Micropatterned Au has a variety of applications in microelectronics, electrocatalysts, miniaturized antennae, etc., but not all of these applications justify the complicated, expensive, and time-consuming process of photolithography. In previous research, our group developed a method of electrodepositing Au onto a patterned, photodoped cuprous oxide (Cu2O) film, resulting in a Au pattern. The problem is that for the Au pattern to be useful, it can’t be on a conductive substrate like the Cu2O electrode. My specific goal is to isolate the Au pattern from the Cu2O electrode so that it can be transferred to a more useful substrate (ex. a silicon wafer), while maintaining the pattern’s integrity.
My incredible mentor, Dr. Coridan, was my professor for Chemistry II for Majors during spring of my freshman year. I had a meeting with him to talk about how to get involved with research in the Chemistry department, and he encouraged me to look through all the professors’ websites to see what kind of research they do and what I’d be interested in. This was great advice, but honestly all of their research descriptions went completely over my head, and most of the time I had no idea what I was reading. So, I took a different approach and reached out to Dr. Coridan again to see if he had any openings for undergrads in his lab, because I really enjoyed having him as a professor and he seemed passionate about his research. Once I got accepted into his lab, Dr. Coridan gave me a tour of the different projects his students were working and the different equipment they had available to see what piqued my interest. I ended up settling into work involving electrodeposition, and I was paired with the graduate student who has guided me for the past year, James Lowe.
The first step for my project was to figure out a general way to electrodeposit just a small area of Au onto the Cu2O electrode so that I can experiment with isolating it. When non-chemistry people ask me to explain what this is, I usually say something like “I grow gold like a leprechaun,” which is a bit of an embellishment but still a good visualization. This first step, which I thought would be the easiest and shortest step, ended up taking me the entire semester to complete. We started out taping around a small square on the Cu2O electrode using electroplating tape. It turned out that electroplating tape isn’t very friendly with Cu2O, and it kept floating off during Au electrodeposition no matter how I arranged it. We tried Avery reinforcement labels, which seemed to work well for a while, but stopped working out of nowhere. This whole process took the span of a few months, and it got very frustrating and discouraging to continually try and fail. But it also taught me a very valuable lesson: creating a new way to do something in the research field takes perseverance and a lot more creativity than I had previously thought.
By the end of the semester, I was feeling pretty hopeless about my project, until I had a talk with another faculty member at our chemistry Honors Poster Symposium. Dr. Martin Edwards was asking me some questions about my poster, and I was telling him about how my project sometimes felt like me just messing around and trying random things, how I didn’t always feel very “science-y”. He told me a story about he some of lab students ended up making their project work using clear nail polish. This comment stuck with me, and as a sort of Hail Mary on one of my last weeks of the semester we decided to try clear nail polish, and it worked perfectly! My next steps are to experiment with the interactions between Cu2O and the small area of Au, and to figure out how to separate the two. Currently, we’re planning to try using polymer stamps and etching techniques.
Overall, my experience has taught me that research doesn’t look the same in all settings, and it’s certainly not how I imagined it coming into college. My research frequently took the form of an arts and crafts project this semester, but it was still all part of the process, and a lot of progress was made there. I also learned that it’s okay if you’re not sure what direction you want to go with your research, or what you’re even interested in. Sometimes you just have to take the opportunity to try something new and see if you like it first. Finally, I learned that research is an incredibly collaborative process, and I’m so grateful to Dr. Coridan, James, and the other grad students in the lab for their patience, guidance, and ideas.