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I'm Allison Campbell and I am the EMSL director and I'm here with Niraj Suresh
and we are here in the X-ray Tomography lab.
So Niraj can you tell me a little about yourself where you are from?
I'm actually from India. I was and India untill 10th grade.
and I moved here for 11th and 12th grade. I go to Hanford High and I'm in 12th grade now.
Where in India are you from?
I'm from Banglore which is South India. Yeah, ok.
So I visited New Delhi last July.
I had a great time. So what attracted you to come to EMSL as part of your
educational experience?
Well there are a couple seniors at Hanford who we're doing the internship
here at EMSL and I thought I'd apply because I have in interest in science and
math from school and it was only when
I got in that I actually realized what type of environment it was going to be
and how
sciences gonna be incorporated into my schedule I wasn't exactly
like school. It is not like school science at all.
its it's interesting. I think that's the biggest surprise that a lot of
younger students in high school in an undergraduate their chemistry and
biology classes tend to be beakers and
mixing and reactions and coming to a lab like this there is
a lot of instrumentation and lot of
data analysis and it is just a very different type of science.
That is the first thing that struck me. Yeah.
so what are you doing here in this laboratory can you describe what you are doing?
so we help clients come in here and if they want
a sample scanned so that they can look inside of it,
or they can analyze it in more detail. We scan it in the X-ray Tomographic
and I I analyze the data
on the computer system that we have a
reconstructing the slices and we get a 3-D representation of the sample
so you can see the pores in all the different materials.
So you are using an X-ray so is it a lot like getting an X-ray of a bone?
It's exactly like that. It's basically a CT scan for objects. Uh huh
So I have here a so this is a type of sample you might look at
a core of some material
and so you can look right through it with the X-rays. We can stack through it,
we can produce two thousand slices
from top to bottom of it and you can view each individual slice.
Great. Aspects of it. And so
than what you can do is computationally reconstruct a three-dimensional image
so you have a computer image of this
yeah, manipulated it, move it
and then look inside it. That is very cool. What's the most interesting sample
that you have looked at to-date do you think?
Well the most interesting is the previous intern
Shawn Stevens actually scanned a root sample and then he managed to
reconstruct it and and produced a really high-quality
reconstruction
and he was able to calculate the volume and surface area of the root which was
pretty interesting and
a as far as how it looked and how
he was able to color it and and based on on
distances from the surface and density was pretty interesting that's
what got me interested in the root project. So you in your own
science are you interested in
more biological sciences chemical, physics, materials? I'm more interested in
physics at school. Do you have a school that you are looking at to go to
I'll well really I
high-ranked engineering schools in general but it
would be nice to go to Georgia Tech
Or the University of Washington. Yeah both are very good schools.
Do you interact with many other students from high school here?
Yes we have three other interns from my high school
and so we collaborate on some projects and one of the other interns has had
a project in which he s too spew out tons of data
and so he couldn't do it manually and keep up with the workload so
We got together and we manages to create a create a script
that can run the data efficiently so we could
come up with the data quicker so he could move on. So everybody gets to ask a question
or two of me
during these interviews, do you have any questions? People have asked me what the
names in my dogs are, what sports I like to play, what books I read, music
or something about EMSL so anything you want. What is your favorite college football team?
University of Oregon Ducks.
Okay. I didn't go to school there but I was born and raised in Oregon and
my mom and my grandmother were students there and I have always followed them.
and I'm a big fan. So
how about you? I don't watch college football.
Do you have a favorite sport? Basketball.
Who is your favorite basketball team? The Chicago Bulls. Oh so
professional do you watch college? College
probably, this is a tough
one, probably Duke, yeah
they are struggling this year. Yeah they always pull it out in the end.
Well great. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
I'm glad you are here at EMSL
and thanks. Thank you very much.