SAS – Serious About Science – NSF- BuG ReMeDEE

(Left to Right: Standing:Zachary Houghan; Saveena Solanki; Payal Thakur; Magan Vaughn; Vaishali Sharma; Priya Saxena: Team Leader-Professor Rajesh Sani; Dipayan Samanta; Dr. Jia Wang; Shailabh Rauniyar. Left to Right: Sitting: Tanya Kuthiyala; Tanvi Govil; Sourav Dutta)

This year, 1689 people attended Neutrino Day: A Cosmic Symphony, with more than 550 attending the finale, “The Legend of the Northern Lights”—both are record numbers! The whole day was a tremendous success. It started with a ray of sunshine at Sanford Lab, a place where people of all ages learned and discovered different types of science experiments, perform several fun activities and enhance their knowledge by some useful scientific demonstrations. Many people from different states and countries participated, explored new science innovations and techniques.

Since our lab has been working on the use of unprocessed agricultural biomasses and attempting to convert them into value-added products like biopolymers. We thought it will be a good activity to make people understand the concept of biomass pretreatment, and how our approach of using corn stover is different from other researchers. Hence, for this year’s the neutrino day, we demonstrated the use of 2nd generation lignocellulosic biomass as a substrate in order to obtain some useful products like biofuel, bioelectricity, biopolymers, and bioethanol. It was a wonderful experience for our group, with more of an opportunity to make people understand more about the research that we do in our lab and the importance of avoiding pretreatment.