November Lunch & Learn: Microbes and Measurement

Join us for our ​​​​​November Lunch & Learn featuring talks by graduate students in ​​Chemical Engineering and ​​Education! Lunch & Learn is co-sponsored by the Graduate Division, the Graduate Student Association, and the UCSB Library. ​Feed your mind and your stomach while socializing with grad students from across the campus!

​Friday, November 8
Noon-1 p.m.
Library, Room 1312 (map)
*To ensure we have enough food, ​please RSVP*

Improving Electricity Generation from Microbial Communities

​Samantha McCuskey
Graduate Student in ​​​Chemical Engineering

The bacterial world is full of microbes with extraordinary abilities, among them is the skill to produce electricity. In nature, these "electrogenic" bacteria generate current as part of their metabolism. Their lab is creating materials to increase extracellular electron transfer efficiency via membrane-modifiers and conductive polymer networks. These approaches could improve applications such as wastewater treatment, sustainable electricity generation, and bioelectrosynthesis.

Making Sense of Nonsensical Survey Items

Melissa Gordon-Wolf
Graduate Student in Education

Have you ever taken a survey and not understood what an item meant? Misfit between the way researchers intend for items to be interpreted and the way participants actually interpret items is an underacknowledged threat to the validity of survey results. Given that survey results are commonly used as outcome measures in scientific studies, it is critical to reduce this misfit. In this talk, Melissa will present a new method called Response Process Evaluation to improve the validity of our surveys.

This event will be moderated by​ ​Shawn Warner-Garcia, the Director of Professional Development for the UCSB Graduate Division.

Interested in being a presenter at an upcoming Lunch & Learn? Click here to find out more! If you have any questions about this event or Lunch & Learn in general, please email Daina Tagavi.