Aaron Strickland: I’m about a year and a half through my project, and I’m now just getting the data that I was wanting to get at the start.

Welcome to EarthSky’s Chronicles of a Science Experiment, Episode 6. This season we’re following Aaron Strickland, a postdoctoral chemist at Cornell University. His research project is in nanotechnology, the science of the very small.

In this sixth episode, Aaron talks about sticking together – that is the sticking together of sugars that he’s synthesized in the lab with proteins collected from E. Coli bacteria. It’s a big step in his experiment. And the ultimate goal is to mimic what the bacteria does naturally – growing near perfect hexagonal patterns of crystals on its surface.

Our thanks to Aaron Strickland, National Science Foundation Discovery Corps Fellow and Cornell University chemist. Carl Batt of Cornell created the concept for this program.

Made possible by the National Science Foundation