Research!!!

…in case you've been wondering what I do every day. :)  I'll start at the beginning:

My research this year is supported by a grant through Fulbright, which is an international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government. There are two main types of grants: teaching and research. For the research grants, you can propose basically any research project in almost any country. I applied for a research grant last summer, and in my proposal I proposed a project to carry out with the specific group I'm working with now.

My group is a physical computational chemistry group at University Pablo de Olavide, in the outskirts of Sevilla. They focus on the study and design of nanostructured materials, which include zeolites, the materials I did research on at Carleton. I first heard of this group because I had read a lot of their papers for my research at Carleton, and I visited their group a year and a half ago when I went to Spain to visit my sister and a friend. I went to a group meeting and talked to the PI and a couple of the grad students. I liked the group and their research a lot so I decided to apply to work with them for the Fulbright!

I've been working with the group a little over two weeks now, and I'm basically a PhD student group member for the year. Before I started with the group, the PI and a few of the students decided what would be "my" topic for the year: hydrogen storage in zeolites! Hydrogen is a clean, renewable fuel, but an efficient way to store it must be found before hydrogen can be used to power, say, cars. A possible storage option is adsorption of hydrogen onto zeolites - i.e. storing molecules of hydrogen gas inside the pores of the zeolite. All my work is on the computer, so day-to-day my activities might include setting up and running simulations, working up results, reading articles, searching the literature for computational models. I'm definitely enjoying my research so far.

I love the group! Right now there are 8 PhD students, one postdoc, one person who just finished his PhD with the group and is now a lecturer at the university and still doing research with the group, and another postdoc coming this month. Everyone in the group is Spanish except for the postdoc, who's from France. Everyone is really friendly, and have been extremely helpful with getting me started in the lab, answering all my questions, and being patient with my Spanish. One thing I really like is that everyone eats lunch (the main meal of the day) together every single day, and also spend time together outside the lab. In general the environment is very friendly and it doesn't seem like a high-strung group at all.

The lab itself is super nice - two big, spacious, connected rooms with lots of windows, and a nice desk and computer for each person and tables in the middle for meetings and for lunch. A photo of part of one of the rooms:

I've usually been getting into the lab around 10am and leaving around 7-8pm, with an hour or two for lunch - pretty typical hours for the group. I take the metro to and from campus, and my commute is a 10-minute walk to the metro stop, a 20-minute metro ride, and a 15-minute walk through campus to our building. Definitely different from the 4- or 5-minute "commute" I was used to at Carleton! The metro ride is nice though, and a good time to read the newspaper.

And wow, typing this post was a bit of a challenge because after spending hours and hours every day on my Spanish keyboard in the lab I'm getting really used to where all the symbols are on there!