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For today’s “Day in the Lab”, I’ve made the jaunt over to the Chemistry Building to meet up with two of Chemistry’s wonderful technicians: Naseem Aktar, Teaching Laboratory Technician, and Dr Peter Bentley, an Analytical Support Technician. Although they are both technicians, they do wildly different jobs within the department – so I’m in for an interesting experience following them around for a couple of hours!

As we are about to set out to her lab, Nas assures me that no two days as a technician are ever the same, and that as a technician, you have to have excellent time management, the ability to multitask, and the ability to roll with whatever interruptions come your way. This is swiftly proved to be correct as we are immediately waylaid by a lost-looking electrician trying to find a particular electrical cupboard, and then spend ten minutes trying to figure out where it is he actually needs to be.

Electrician sent off in the correct direction, Nas takes me to her pride and joy, the Physical and Analytical Teaching Lab. As a Teaching Technician, it is Nas’s job to make sure that all of the undergraduate chemists have all of the supplies and kit necessary in order to complete their practicals, as well as ensuring that the labs are kept clean and tidy after the practicals have finished. Peter affectionately dubbed Nas the “Queen of Clean”, a title that is well-deserved- her lab is immaculate, and a far cry from any chemistry lab you might see on TV. In particular, Nas is very keen on ensuring that her labs are not only clean, but are also environmentally friendly, which earnt her lab the University’s very first Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) bronze and silver awards. The LEAF certification is a standard pioneered by UCL, and encourages lab owners and managers to ensure that their labs are taking steps to reduce their carbon emissions and making efforts to save on plastic, water and chemical waste. This includes making sure that everyone shuts their fume cupboards when they’re not in use. There are over 100 interconnected fume cupboards in Chemistry that are constantly regulating the flow of air out of the cupboards to ensure toxic fumes are extracted, so it’s important to make sure they’re shut to reduce energy consumption and the amount of energy the cupboards have to draw in.

Nas’s LEAF certificate displayed front and centre on her lab door!

Inside what was possibly the tidiest lab I’ve ever seen in my life (which admittedly isn’t many, coming from a background in English Literature), Nas has a “Spectroscopy in a Suitcase” kit set up, which one of the department’s PhD students is currently testing with the intentions of designing a new practical to take out to schools. Outside of term time, her labs and facilities are typically used to support the many outreach events that the department runs both on campus and in local schools, to give young people a taste of what university-level chemistry is like!

The “spectroscopy” part of the suitcase.

The “Spectroscopy in a Suitcase” activity is one that chemistry has run for many years. It allows students to undertake a “forensic style” experiment, using the “Fourier Transform Infared (or FTIR) spectrometer to analyse samples to find out what their molecular structure is! FTIR spectroscopy has many applications, such as drug analysis, forensic evidence analysis, and even assessing nutritional content of foods and drinks.

The next stop on Nas’s part of the tour is the Synthetic Teaching labs, where the final lab of the year is about to take place. Here, fellow technician Dr John Baum is setting things up for the students. Most of the work done in this lab is done in the aforementioned fume hoods, as the students will be using solvents and other chemicals that are best not breathed in if one wishes for a long and healthy life.

The Synthetic Teaching Lab, mid set up for the final practical of the year.

Keeping these labs running is no mean feat- Nas and the other technicians have to keep on top of supplies to ensure there is enough of everything for the students to complete their practicals – which are a necessary part of their degree’s accreditation. This means taking regular stock checks throughout the term, from glassware and chemicals, to gloves and paper towels! Nas and her fellow teaching technicians are also responsible for delivering the practicals and providing demonstrations so that students know what it is they need to do before they’re set loose on the kit.

Boxes and boxes of gloves – all thanks to the technicians!

During my visit, Peter and Nas also decided to show me the most important part of Chemistry: the bins. More specifically, the solvent waste storage. Unsurprisingly, Chemistry produces the largest amount of chemical waste of the departments, which needs to be collected by specific companies to be disposed of or recycled. Synthetic chemistry specifically produces a lot of waste – these labs can use up to 30 bottles of acetone a month, so it’s important that there is somewhere safe to store both the used and unused supplies of chemicals! The storage bins they’re kept in are naturally fire proof and bunded at the bottom in case of spills, to ensure that the chemicals can’t pool on the floor or leach into the environment. It is a part of the technicians’ role to order in chemicals for lab usage, ensure that everything is charged to the correct research code, and generate a list for the waste companies so they know exactly what has been used and what to bring in order to dispose of it safely!

Waste collection happened about four times a year, with the whole of the University receiving a collection on the same day, coordinated by technicians from across the institution. Chemistry alone normally takes 1-2 hours for the collection, and Nas has to stay with the waste until the collection is completed – rain or shine!

The solvent waste store. Apparently this is it fairly empty!

As this was a double-bill featuring two of our wonderful technicians, Peter also gave me an insight into what his day-to-day looks like from the perspective of a support technician. Unlike Nas, he’s not involved in running the teaching labs; instead, much of his role during term-time is supporting final-year students with their research projects, whilst out of term, his focus typically shifts to assisting academics with their research.

The first stop was to turn on the ICP-OES (Inductively-Coupled Plasma – Optical Emission Spectroscopy), a piece of kit used to identify and measure the concentration of inorganic elements (such as metals) in liquid samples. Today, Peter is getting it ready for a student who will be using it to analyse ruthenium calcite samples as a part of their post-doctoral project.

Peter with the Inductively-Coupled Plasma Optical Emissions Spectrometer. Try saying that quickly three times….

The ICP-OES takes a good couple of hours to boot up, so turning it on is often Peter’s first job of the morning. This piece of kit heats samples up to about 10,000 ?C using plasma. This breaks the sample down from its molecular form into elements, which are then fed into the detector (the “OES” part of the machine”). Each element has a specific wavelength of light it emits under the UV and visible spectrums. Therefore, the OES is able to identify the presence of different elements, with the intensity of these wavelengths being indicative of the concentration of the elements present. As the ICP-OES only deals with liquid samples, a typical day could often involve a lot of sample preparation by digesting any solid samples in acid ready for analysis.

In addition to the ICP-OES, Peter also supports the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) facilities in Chemistry, topping them up with liquid nitrogen or helium when needed. Chemistry has both solid and liquid state NMR labs which are used by most researchers, so require regular checks to ensure that they are ready to run. The NMRs require a weekly top with nitrogen, whilst the larger solid state NMR (housed in its own room) requires topping up monthly with liquid nitrogen to keep the liquid helium inside cold – which in turn keeps the magnets inside the NMR cold!

The solid state NMR – so big it needs a set of stairs to access the loader!

As the names suggest, the liquid state NMR is used for the analysis of liquid samples, whilst the solid state NMR analyses rigid samples such as powders, polymers, and solids. Both devices allow chemists to analyse the molecular structure, composition, and biomolecular dynamics of samples using a magnetic field – crucially without damaging the samples in the process.

For the final stop on the tour, Peter and Nas then took me to the chromatography room, which is where Peter mostly lives during the week. Today, Peter is conducting an analysis on behalf of some academics in LEC, as this facility is a core facility within the University and often takes projects from across the Faculty. Specifically, he’s looking at the effect diesel spills have in our oceans by looking at polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compounds in water – PAHs being organic compounds that are formed primarily by incomplete combustion of organic materials such as coal and oil. He’s running some standard PAHs to check that the methodology is correct and then running the SPE (solid-phase) extractions, so he’ll be preparing the samples and loading them into the gas chromatography mass spectrometer (GCMS) to check that everything is working as expected.

To run GCMS, samples have to be vaporised and are carried through a long, narrow capillary column by an inert gas (such as helium), which separates the components based on their volatility and interaction with the “stationary phase” in the column – this is usually some form of silica.

A Gas Chromatography column, used to separate compounds in samples.

?Different elements and compounds will travel through the column at different rates, These are separated out in the “mass spectrometer” part of the GCMS, which will then produce a molecular “fingerprint” for each component of the sample, allowing chemists to identify them as well as the quantities of them within the sample. GCMS (and its liquid counterpart) have a wide range of applications, from environmental monitoring to forensics and drug detections, hence why it’s such a popular piece of kit!

And with that, my tour was over and it was back to my day job (which was mostly writing this up, if I’m honest). The one thing I’ve always been struck by whilst doing these lab tours is the passion that our technicians have for their work – be it the research they’re undertaking, or the students they’re supporting. Their jobs are by no means easy, and they deserve a greater degree of recognition for the crucial roles they play in keeping the University’s labs and facilities running -which was the reason I started up this series in the first place!

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