- March 09, 2022
"Thanks to my MISTI Japan internship, I now have a clearer image of what I want to do post-graduation. I wasn’t sure I would like working in Japan, but this summer has shown me that working in Japan is something I want to seriously pursue."
The department I worked for was called the Advanced Applied Science Department. It is a research and development division. They work on a variety of projects which are thought up by the company or commissioned by clients.
It turned out that my internship was similar to the previous MIT intern De Xin Chen’s project. I was working with the same advisor, Hiroshi Sato, on a chemical sensor. The previous work had been for developing a chemical sensor for CO2, but my project was detection of glucose.
The purpose of a chemical sensor is to detect the presence of a target molecule. Good chemical sensors are able to do so even in the presence of impurities. The chemical sensor used in these experiments used a molecule called Phenylboronic Acid (PBA). PBA is able to bind to sugars like glucose which can be detected via electrochemical measurement.