Great meeting tonight FRESH!
Here are a few notes to keep us focused for the next week. Since we don't have too many tangible goals down for the remainder of the semester, Young suggested we brainstorm a set to keep us accountable. Awesome idea, Meeting Lead!
Most exciting news first- our other PCM has arrived at last. Now all we have to do is test it against the Greenbox PCM. Quint and the rest of the PCM team hope to accomplish this in the next two weeks. Next up, our presentation team is continuing to revise the poster they designed for Undergraduate Research Day, as well as getting a script ready for the 5 minute (so short) Unite for Sight presentation.
In terms of actually building this box, we still have a few hurdles to cross. After paying for the PCMs, thermocouples, and conference fees, we have depleted all of our Gemstone funding. Since we have so many creative people on our team, we really view this as a blessing in disguise. Just imagine all of the fun ways we can raise some cash-- bake sales, fundraisers, Foo's online schemes, there's a lot out there. [But NSF, if you're reading this, please feel free to throw us some cash this way. We will gladly take it!]
The construction team made the final list of materials needed to design the box, so we're really waiting on the money (about $55) to go out to Home Depot and buy them. This week they will start contacting people in the engineering department/mechanics shop to get a better idea of the steps to physically construct this box. Also in light of long-term mass manufacturing costs (knock on wood, we get there!), we want to get an idea of how buying individual panels matches up with creating a mold for a box.
Moving on, the finite elements team is hard at work on the modeling. Kelly briefed the rest of the team on some errors that came up in the program. It's only a matter of time until these two (Kelly and Matt) get it right...If you guys can't do it, I don't know who else can. Finite elements will give us an update in two weeks.
Proposal team (me, Amanda, Amina, Jason) briefly addressed refining the first three chapters of our thesis (including the potential public health concept paper). In the next week, each subteam will internally edit their contribution to the thesis. The following week, an editing team will be selected to nail the grammar and style issues.
Last, but not least, the marketing team (plus a few others) trudged on in their effort to get a projected price for our box. Sahil, Ravi, Young, and I worked on this for the majority of the time. We looked over some of the articles we've collected over the past few months, and found some valuable stats regarding freeze exposure rates (based on a systematic lit review of cold chain studies), and even a few speaking to how precise the FreezeWatch is in detecting loss of vaccine potency. Another interesting statistic we found pointed to ~16% freeze exposure found in developed countries, compared to ~35% in developing countries while in transport...I also saw an article in the American Journal of Public Health the other day on detecting freezing in the Texas cold chain. Maybe we ought to revisit the industrialized world to see what lessons they can teach us. Even after using PCM's and expensive infrastructure, there still seems to be freezing.
The percentage of wastage is enormous, meaning the sum of money lost is enormous, which has left us enormously confused as to how these rates could possibly be true. Why hasn't something been done about this loss earlier? Still thinking on that one. More updates to come.
~Veena
Here are a few notes to keep us focused for the next week. Since we don't have too many tangible goals down for the remainder of the semester, Young suggested we brainstorm a set to keep us accountable. Awesome idea, Meeting Lead!
Most exciting news first- our other PCM has arrived at last. Now all we have to do is test it against the Greenbox PCM. Quint and the rest of the PCM team hope to accomplish this in the next two weeks. Next up, our presentation team is continuing to revise the poster they designed for Undergraduate Research Day, as well as getting a script ready for the 5 minute (so short) Unite for Sight presentation.
In terms of actually building this box, we still have a few hurdles to cross. After paying for the PCMs, thermocouples, and conference fees, we have depleted all of our Gemstone funding. Since we have so many creative people on our team, we really view this as a blessing in disguise. Just imagine all of the fun ways we can raise some cash-- bake sales, fundraisers, Foo's online schemes, there's a lot out there. [But NSF, if you're reading this, please feel free to throw us some cash this way. We will gladly take it!]
The construction team made the final list of materials needed to design the box, so we're really waiting on the money (about $55) to go out to Home Depot and buy them. This week they will start contacting people in the engineering department/mechanics shop to get a better idea of the steps to physically construct this box. Also in light of long-term mass manufacturing costs (knock on wood, we get there!), we want to get an idea of how buying individual panels matches up with creating a mold for a box.
Moving on, the finite elements team is hard at work on the modeling. Kelly briefed the rest of the team on some errors that came up in the program. It's only a matter of time until these two (Kelly and Matt) get it right...If you guys can't do it, I don't know who else can. Finite elements will give us an update in two weeks.
Proposal team (me, Amanda, Amina, Jason) briefly addressed refining the first three chapters of our thesis (including the potential public health concept paper). In the next week, each subteam will internally edit their contribution to the thesis. The following week, an editing team will be selected to nail the grammar and style issues.
Last, but not least, the marketing team (plus a few others) trudged on in their effort to get a projected price for our box. Sahil, Ravi, Young, and I worked on this for the majority of the time. We looked over some of the articles we've collected over the past few months, and found some valuable stats regarding freeze exposure rates (based on a systematic lit review of cold chain studies), and even a few speaking to how precise the FreezeWatch is in detecting loss of vaccine potency. Another interesting statistic we found pointed to ~16% freeze exposure found in developed countries, compared to ~35% in developing countries while in transport...I also saw an article in the American Journal of Public Health the other day on detecting freezing in the Texas cold chain. Maybe we ought to revisit the industrialized world to see what lessons they can teach us. Even after using PCM's and expensive infrastructure, there still seems to be freezing.
The percentage of wastage is enormous, meaning the sum of money lost is enormous, which has left us enormously confused as to how these rates could possibly be true. Why hasn't something been done about this loss earlier? Still thinking on that one. More updates to come.
~Veena
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