KEG Lab
Digging dirt and shooting it with X-rays
2008-2010 · Lenses: Legit Business, Useful Nonsense, Public Weirdness, Actual Sincerity · Roles: Collaboration
In college (and for a year or so after), I worked as a research assistant at Chapman University’s Kim Environmental Geochemistry (KEG) Lab. When I was there, we mainly studied the arsenic levels of soil near abandoned mining sites.
We’d take occasional trips into the desert to dig up samples, then fly to the San Francisco Bay to analyze them. We worked at Stanford’s Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, which is a facility attached to a particle accelerator that shoots insanely high-powered X-rays at stuff to find out what speciation of stuff that stuff’s made of. I had to get certified as a U.S. Department of Energy radiological worker. I’ve completely forgotten if that entailed any training at all.
Because time at the facility was precious, we’d operate a couple beamlines 24/7 (it was mostly lines 10-2 and 2-3 for you Synchrotron-heads out there). This means sometimes we’d sleep on a cot for the three or four hours it took to run a sample on the Germanium crystal detector. “Under a desk at a particle accelerator” is one of the weirder places I’ve woken up.