Picture | Wim Noorduin, Harvard
  • Research , Student

TU/e student’s flowers on cover Science

Chemistry student Roel Sadza’s internship at Harvard, which he completed nearly two years ago, has resulted in something quite wonderful only two weeks ago. The experiments he carried out for his minor at the prestigious US university were printed in the cover story of Science. The images of flower-shaped crystals that formed spontaneously can now be seen all over the world.

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Over the summer of 2011, Sadza, who’s currently in the board of study association Japie, spent three months in the lab of prof. Joanna Aizenberg through intercession of his supervisor dr. Nico Sommersdijk. In Boston he assisted Dutch postdoc Wim Noorduin with experiments. They mixed sodium silicate and barium chloride solutions in a beaker and then exposed them to CO2 from the air, which led to the forming of flower-shaped crystals measuring no more than several dozen micrometers. Noorduin colored the images generated with an electron microscope, making them look very similar to flowerbeds.

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