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Year 2 ended with a clearer picture of the landscape. Year 3 was about putting my head down and getting to work — spinning up experiments, iterating on methods, writing code, and learning how to tell the story of what I was building.
I TAed Richard Murray's Scalable Innovation course — the same class I’d taken in my first year, which helped me build my original techno-economic model. Being on the other side gave me a chance to talk to the instructors further about my project and to watch new teams wrestle with the same scaling questions I was still working through myself.
The columns I'd spent the summer getting watertight were finally ready for their first round of selection, but before I could set up on a new roof (with an elevator! No more hauling water up the stairs to the North Mudd roof), there was a quick detour to the basement so they could be put on display for the Resnick Sustainability Center dedication.
Preparing the columns for the Resnick Sustainability Center (RSC) building dedication
That winter I visited labs in Switzerland and Germany to explore whether I could do part of my work in Europe. Every lab I met with told me the same thing: stay in California, only America had the capital and comfort with big ideas I would need to make my ponds a reality. Politics aside, the sunlight alone made the choice clear.
A few weeks later the world (southern California) was on fire. The fires forced evacuations across LA, and I ended up staying at the Kerckhoff Marine Laboratory in Newport Beach for the first time —Caltech's forgotten marine lab and a place that would become increasingly important to my work. Despite sleeping on an office floor, I interviewed roughly 30 SURF student candidates during the fires, found two with complementary skill sets, and a few weeks later accidentally ended up with a third.
Around this time I built the time and space package — a tool to visualize and communicate about the radically different scales my work spans, from microbial metabolism to planetary carbon cycling. I used it at the PriME regional meeting to create an interactive summary mapping the scale of experiments in time and space against the processes we study. A graduate student in the Cordero lab thought it could work well in a perspective piece about tools in microbiology and we began meeting to further develop the article. PriME leadership liked the activity enough that they used my code to rerun the activity at the following regional meeting in Europe.
Interactive — hover for details, pan and zoom, click legend items to toggle layers.
That spring I started working with Gigi, an energetic Caltech junior studying chemistry with a passion for research and an interest in scalable carbon capture. We focused on long term sequestration, designing experiments to expand on my first year qualifying work testing the impact of water activity on anaerobic microbial production of CO2, CH4, and N2O. This required iterating on an ISQ protocol for measuring CO2, CH4, and N2O adding an injection loop for consistency and to allow off-gassing of excess. Another Caltech undergrad helped me set up the columns on the roof, but even with his help I was spending a lot of time lugging water. I started thinking about having salt water on tap and planning out the summer with my three SURFs. If we spent part of our time down in Newport at the marine lab (KML) I could get another set of columns set up (and maybe even a larger incubation) and use the water tank and sea water filtration system already installed on the roof. A discussion with a hydrologist friend, Nick Depsky, helped me realize that large swaths of the country I'd written off due to water transport costs could actually host ponds. He sent me a plot of known underground brine aquifers throughout the US (with TDS above the limit for agriculture and within 10m of the surface), and I was thrilled, this was a meaningful expansion of where deployment could work, even better it opened up non arable, cheap land in sparsely populated areas, exactly what I needed.
I presented my work at geoclub and the Resnick Sustainability Institute luncheon and got encouraging feedback. Challenging questions about the revenue side of my TEA and potential environmental consequences of the ponds, particularly after flooding events gave me a lot to consider. The hardest question came from Jonas Peters, who wanted to know what the whole system looks like at scale. I realized I had a vivid mental image of it but couldn't describe it clearly, so I worked with an architect and experimented with AI art tools to try to capture it.
The images to the right are the result. While they aren't perfect renderings of my mental model, they help communicate some aspects of the overall system and intended scale.
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