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Devin, The Blogger

Science Update!

10/13/2020

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Hi Friends! I thought I'd give you all a quick research update. 

Hopefully you all remembered that I'm developing a new ionization source for mass spectrometry called Thread Spray. Here's a thread about it to refresh your memory. 

​The highlights of that thread are that I can use cotton spool thread to do high level chemistry. My current project is focuses on metabolic syndrome, more specifically obesity. My goal for this project is to use the concentrations of free fatty acids as biomarkers of obesity to determine the level of health risk in untreated clinically relevant serum samples...all with cotton thread. Now why in theory does this work? Well excess body fat = high lipid concentrations. When those lipids breakdown, they form free fatty acids in serum. So the more fat, the more fatty acids. (Which I can take full advantage of with mass spectrometry).
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Another thing about lipids, as you can see from that picture, is that the "fatty acid" part is variable. Sometimes it's a saturated fatty acid (FA), which doesn't have a double bond. Other times it's unsaturated, which does have double bonds. In this work, I've been looking at 8 different FAs in different types of serum (some clinically obese, others healthy, etc.) to see if:
  1. Can I use thread to tell the difference in FA type in a sample?
  2. Can I use thread to tell the differences in their concentrations? 

The short answer is yes I can! I have been looking at different fatty concentration ratios to make inferences on diet and health risk. I cannot wait to write this up and publish it so I give you ALL of the deets.

But here's why I think this is awesome. 

It's awesome because small molecules contain a lot of information! Being able to discriminate between type AND concentration allows for future work to be done in studying metabolic syndrome and its health implications. This project is step 1 for my lab in terms of disease diagnosis.
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Welcome to my site!

7/8/2020

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Hi everyone! Welcome to my personal website called Devin, The Chemist. I'm happy you've checked in.

Living in the digital age where everyone loves having access to information at their fingertips, I wanted to start this website to showcase my science and advocacy work. As some of you may know, #MacScientist, the blog I co-run, is used to talk about my experiences as a Black woman in STEM and other general hot topics. For my professional website, AKA this one, we're going to focus solely on chemistry and STEM advocacy. I want to use this as a means to connect and collaborate with other STEMvocate and those in my field. Think of this as like a mini version of #BlackInChem from Twitter. I'm really always down to talk science as well, if that's what you're interested in doing. 

I'm also offering professional services! I've spent the bulk of my life creating programs and curating materials to help increase recruitment and retention efforts for Black students, so I wanted to spread that knowledge to others. I've been doing this for free for far too long, honestly. Along with that, you can book me for various speaking engagements. If there is something else you would like to collaborate on that isn't outlined on my site, don't hesitate to contact me on this website or on any of my social media platforms. 


I hope you enjoy Devin, The Chemist and I look forward to connecting with you soon!
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