NASA MUST Scholar Spotlight

NASA MUST Scholar Spotlight

Courtney Giannini

2009 - 2010 MUST Scholar

My name is Courtney Giannini and I am entering my sophomore year at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.  I am majoring in Chemical Engineering with a concentration in pre-medicine.  I first found the MUST project my senior year of high school when I was looking for a scholarships.  I applied for it, and didn't think I had a chance because the opportunity just seemed too good to be true.  The program has turned out to be even better than I first expected.  My summer internship was amazing, and at the conference not only did we get an amazing tour of Kennedy Space Center, and a great professional development curriculum, but I got a chance to connect with other MUST scholars.  I've stayed in touch with many of them and a group of four of us decided to form a team to submit a project to "NASA's Reduced Gravity Flight Opportunity".  We're designing an experiment involving nanowire synthesis in microgravity.  If our proposal gets accepted we'll get to test it on a reduced gravity flight. 

This summer I worked at the John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, on a project known as IntraVenous Fluid Generation System (IVGEN).  The aim of the project was to purify potable drinking water to make sterile water for injection (intravenous fluid) using a microgravity compatible purification and mixing system called IVGEN.  IVGEN purifies the water through a system containing a de-ionizing resin bed, activated carbon filter, and sterilizing IV filters.  My role in the project was to test different filters over a broad range of temperatures and flow rates to ensure that they removed different chemicals and also that they didn't block the flow of water.  This required numerous tests over a significant period of time to determine the combination of filters needed to ensure that our water was completely sterilized to meet the United States Pharmacopeias standards.  If any impurities such as chemicals or bacteria managed to get through, it could be potentially dangerous to the astronauts.  The filters we used also had to be compatible with the system that had already been built, and volume and weight had to be kept to a minimum. The project is supposed to be sent up to the International Space Station for an initial test. 

The MUST project has benefited me and the other scholars tremendously so a group of scholars and I have joined together and made it our goal to give back by increasing the outreach that MUST scholars do.  We're all excited about STEM fields and we want to encourage other students to get involved in them as well and to take advantages of the many resources available such as MUST.