 on to our next impressive research project here with my friend Gabriel. Gabriel kick it off for us tell us a little bit about all of your hard work and this wonderful research that you've conducted here. Yeah so my project was with Dr. Brian Walker and we looked at the presence of microplastics and penguin poop. So microplastics it's a buzzword recently just found in blood but we started this project well over two years ago and with the intention of all right we see that there's plastic in wild penguins we see that there's plastic everywhere can we find them in captive penguins so with that we for the past two years started from scratch very little literature is can be found on this topic so we've had to pull together whatever we could and we made a successful protocol in order to take feces and get it to a point where it's just the plastic remaining so out of all the plot or out of all the samples that we collected we work with three different areas we work with the mystic aquarium the central park zoo and my mentor professor Walker actually went to Argentina into the wild and collected penguins feces of those today we're just looking at the mystic aquarium but my work is going to be continued after I graduate by other research students and at the mystic aquarium or let me talk about the methods we start with poop put it into hydrogen peroxide and that gets rid of anything that's organic so anything that's not synthetic gets rid of it you filter it and what's remaining is these little polymer pieces and you're able to take the pieces run it through an analysis and you could know what the plastic is so from this we had 143 different samples from mystic 118 fibers so but not all the fibers are plastic about we've only been able to look at 47 47 different ones so far and 21 percent of them are plastic which is kind of what you're looking for in the literature there's nothing done captive penguins but in the wild you tend to find that you'll find a lot of different fibers but only between 12 to 35 percent are actually plastic so our research very preliminary right now but the main purpose of this research was to create projects that could have that could occur for many years to come because of what we were able to do with the funding that we got we got it from the corrigans family we also got it from the undergraduate research fund because of that funding we're able to create these protocols that's going to continue to look at penguin poop but also it could be used in any micro plastics project I mean Dr. Walker jokes about us going to the tully grabbing a hot dog and running it through the protocol to see what kind of plastic is in and our main goal is to take captive penguins so whatever we get from mystic and central park and compare it to the wild penguins that Dr. Walker took samples from and then that's our end goal but from there plastic you know it's in our blood it's everywhere so it can really take off really impressive impressive work so you did mention at the beginning of your pitch that micro plastic is only recently a trendy topic so tell me what inspired you to even dive into this research to begin with so uh Dr. Walker has worked with penguins for 25 years so he's quite the penguin guy on campus and plastic one of his colleagues had like started to look at it so when I was brought on to do research with him um he asked me about it and I thought that plastic is kind of everywhere you know it's in everything so why not uh take a look at it and a lot of the literature that's been published that we've looked at has really only started to come up in the past decade so it's very new as opposed to a lot of the other research that what Dr. Walker used to do which was on penguin stress so in he 25 years of work with that versus less than a decade of total work on micro plastics in this field so it's a new emerging field and I want to be a medical doctor one day and we don't know what plastics do to us just yet so I mean right now we're just seeing oh they're there as a doctor in the future I want to know what it does so I guess that's what kind of inspired me to really be gun hoe about this project totally makes sense and it's very interesting um you referenced Dr. Walker so much I'm curious about that mentorship or that mentor to mentee relationship that you have with him through this process yeah no uh I kind of call him like my best friend not gonna lie uh he's just been there for me every step of the way and he's not just like a research mentor he is someone who cares about me as a person when I started doing research with him uh or when I was doing it over the summer I was also studying for Mamcat and he was so understanding gave me all the time and space I needed when I needed to focus on studying he cares about me as a whole person anytime I'm having a bad day sit down tell me about it you know and it's because of that bond that he was able to form with me and because like he went to Argentina and he tried to convince the provost to let me go didn't but to see him like fight for me and to see him care about my development that much is why I talk about him so much because I think a lot of credit goes to him a lot of the reason why I'm here talking to you is because he's cared about me as a person and you know from a lot of the bio department you know I'm biologists maybe a little biased I see a lot of that in the bio department just the professors take such an interest in the students not just and if they're smart or not like they just care which is why yeah that's wonderful um well thank you so much for sharing this wonderful research with us talking about your relationship with Dr Walker and good luck and good luck in your next steps after the symposium thank you so much