Another week at Harwell

[Image shows grating in front of the sample stage and objectives at i13-Diamond Light Source]

I’m finally back in Manchester and I am planning to stay here for at least another month before I have to go to Harwell again. I have beet at Harwell – Diamond Light Source the whole last week and this week Tuesday to Friday during which we had our beamtime. It initially was supposed to be in January but was rescheduled as none of the parties were ready. We thought it will be in April and July but three weeks ago we were informed that it was moved to this week. As you can possibly imagine three weeks is not a lot to prepare cell seeded scaffolds for imaging. The experiments were supposed to start on Wednesday at 9 am, but unfortunately the beamline (the thing that produces x-rays for imaging) wasn’t ready so we started working only at 7 pm. I stayed until 1 am while my supervisor stayed until 3 I believe, on the following day we also had a lot of problems and we started properly working again at around 7 in the evening. At that time, we still had around 30 samples out of 40 done, so we knew that we will have a long night ahead of us. I stayed until 3 am but my supervisor and another guy stayed the whole night and left only at 10 in the morning when I came back to retrieve the data. It’s always like that on beamtimes, however if the team is big enough work can be done in shifts. I have quite a bit of data with me, so I will update you on the data analysis progress next week.

Now the plan is to prepare for the meeting with my main supervisor and my viva at the end of this month. Also, I should start cell culture and contact different people who could help me to stain my scaffolds for imaging.