Nick Waters 

B.S. Student in Chemical Engineering
(University of Pittsburgh ’20)

I am a Chemical Engineering undergraduate at Pitt. I come from a town near Philadelphia, PA. This past summer, I took an internship at TA Instruments as an R&D software/instrument tester in the Rheology Department. One project I completed for them was, researching automated testing software that runs on a Python Interface. This sparked my interest in the Python programming language. Throughout my time at TA Instruments, I picked up some skills to understand basic Rheology, Instrumentation, and Python scientific computing. These skills will provide a useful foundation for what I will be working on in the microBiointerface lab. I will be studying the microrheology of biofilms formed by bacteria at the oil-water interface. We study these films by tracking microscopic particles as they move throughout the films to understand their material properties and why they form. I will help develop the necessary Python programs and procedures to track particles and analyze their trajectories. The data from these programs will then provide useful information to give insight into the nature of biofilms and their properties. Overall, understanding these biofilms could lead to life-saving discoveries and innovations in many different fields of science and engineering.