Nick Wong

Nick Wong

I am a PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University and the Carnegie Institute in the Ludington Lab.

Turbidostat: Building a UI

less than 1 minute read

Published:

It would be nice to be able to see the data of the bioreactor in real time, and it would be useful to use that data and control the machine if necessary. I used customTkinter library for python, which is a wrapper package of tKinter, which itself is a wrap of javascript snippets to make a nice UI. This makes UI design as simple as calling a selection of classes to draw frames, buttons, switches, sliders, and plots. We can even display animated plots to display data in real time.

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I’ve coded the export button to generate a dash interactive plotly server in case something interesting happens in the experiment.

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Turbidostat: Optical density sensors

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Optical density (OD) measurements are crucial to measuring bacterial growth. OD describes the transmission (\(T\)) of light through a highly blocking optical filter, in this case bacteria, such that \(T\) of light through the medium is very small. OD is mathematically expressed as the negative \(log_{10}(T)\) where transmission is a physical value between 0 and 1. Typically OD is measured by shooting a specific wavelength through the test tube that the bacteria cannot absorb, but refract and scatter resulting in decreased detectable transmission from an optical sensor on the other end of the tube. Naturally there should be a linear relationship between the amount of light blocked by the number of bacteria cells in the medium.

Congressional Visit Scientific Advocacy

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The CHIPs act promised to increase the NSF budget to $11.2 billion in 2022, but only enacted $9.1 billion 2 years later 2024. The CHIPs act claimed the NSF’s budget could reach $18.9 billion for FY 2027, but at the current funding rate Congress is far off from reaching this goal. I joined the American Institute for Biological Sciences with other PhD students, postdocs and academics from around the country to advocate increasing NSF funding for the 2025 fiscal year to $11.9 billion. I met with Californian and Maryland congressional staffers with my team to discuss our experiences in academia and how essential NSF funding is to our research and training. Environmental science and conservation projects are almost exclusively funded by government institutions such as NSF, NOAA, and USDA. We were modestly successful, with the NSF budget increasing to $10.183B for 2025 fiscal year.