Leveraging to Lead
Photograph by Mark Lopez

Leveraging to Lead

Leveraging to Lead is a Q&A series that seeks to explore the people and the connections they make that lead to great scientific insights.

Jessica Linville is a postoc in the Energy Systems Division at Argonne National Laboratory. She works on creating cheap and abundant renewable energy sources from waste products.

Q: What do you do here at Argonne?

A: My work focuses on creating a type of renewable energy called biogas. I’m a postdoc, which means that while my boss focuses on big picture items such as writing proposals, funding and attending conferences, I am one of the people who collect and analyze the experimental data.

We are trying to increase the methane content in biogas to greater than 90% so it can be used as a replacement for natural gas. To do that, we work with sewage waste and food waste, depending on which project we are working on. Most of my time in the lab is spent running anaerobic digestion vessels of various sizes and conditions, studying the chemical reactions at a very small scale and creating processes that will allow us to scale up the research to industry-sized proportions. We try to mimic conditions at the waste water treatment plant in order to figure out the chemistry and science to make the whole project work.

Q: Name one way that your life has changed because of the research that you do.

A: I am more aware of the waste I create because I know where it ends up and how it negatively impacts our environment. I started composting at home in order to keep food waste out of the landfill. It actually turns into really great fertilizer; last year I put compost in my vegetable garden and I got an over 10-pound zucchini.

Q: What is important to you about fruitful connections?

A: As a postdoc, this isn’t going to be my final destination as far as a job. I want to make connections with companies doing research that I find interesting in order to find a job once my postdoc appointment is finished.

Q: Have you LinkedIn to any fruitful collaborations?

A: I wanted to grow yeast and was looking for a microbiologist to partner with me on a Laboratory Directed Research & Development proposal. My supervisors put me in touch with Phil Laible, a biophysicist working at the Advanced Protein Characterization Facility. He actually works on other bioenergy projects, so it was a natural fit. The proposal we worked on didn’t get funded, but we still wanted to find a way to work together.

One of my current projects is to determine how microbial communities are structured in sewage sludge. There is a lot of microbial diversity in the sludge and accurately identifying key microbial species and determining the roles they play in this mini system is integral to scaling up this research. It just so happens that in my lab, we didn’t have some of the equipment necessary to do this type of characterization. But Phil was able to provide the equipment we needed and that allowed us to measure the DNA of my samples.

Stay tuned for our next installment of Leveraging to Lead where we meet Phil Laible, biophysicist at Argonne.

To view or add a comment, sign in

Insights from the community

Explore topics