Graduate Student Highlight: Alex Castonguay
Each week, the Department of Chemistry highlights a graduate student who is doing interesting and exciting work around the department. In this installment of our highlight series, we are featuring Alex Castonguay, who is a fifth-year student in the Zarzar lab.
Alex’s research focuses on two main areas. Firstly, he uses a laser to simultaneously create and pattern a variety of metals and metal-oxides directly onto glass. This gives the Zarzar lab excellent control over the composition and placement of these materials, which can then be used to create sensors for gases and biological molecules.
Secondly, Alex studies how droplets of oil in water with various surfactants can solubilize and dissolve, creating gradients of oil in their surrounding solution. Some of these droplets will then interact with their own solubilized oil gradients, causing flows around the droplets that give them active behavior, causing them to move on their own. The Zarzar group is interested in controlling this behavior to use the droplets for a variety of applications, such as drug delivery or modelling more complex systems, such as living cells.
This week, we met virtually with Alex to discuss his life in and outside of the lab! Please enjoy our interview with Alex Castonguay.
Question: How did you get interested in chemistry?
Answer: I had a series of excellent chemistry teachers in high school and college that really made me excited about how molecules and atoms interact with each other. I liked how these teachers described how the nanoscale world of molecular chemistry kept building on itself to create the larger macroscale phenomena that we can see with our own eyes. Turns out I was pretty good at it too, so I stuck with it and continued to enjoy learning more.
Q: What inspires you as a scientist?
A: I find it amazing how far we have come as a society in the last decade, century, and millennia in our understanding of the world. Thinking about how much we have learned and how much more there is to know makes me want to head into the lab, try something new, and see what happens. It is very exciting to be a part of creating new knowledge and understanding of how the world works.
Q: What accomplishment are you most proud of?
A: I recently built from scratch a custom microscope to use in our droplets project. We needed a way to image our droplets from the side, and I was tasked with designing a microscope that could do that. After a couple weeks of looking at how microscopes work and learning how to set up illumination sources and cameras, then lots of trial and error in aligning everything, I had a functioning microscope! It was a very rewarding experience to put the optics skills I’d been building from adjusting our laser table to use in creating something new.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: I grew up in a town in northern New York named Queensbury, which is just outside of the Adirondack Park near Lake George. The landscape is very similar to State College, but with many, many more mountains and lakes. Fun Fact: The movie/book The Last of the Mohicans takes place in and around Queensbury and Lake George. In the story, there is a cave that the characters hide in. You can actually go visit this cave, which is about a ten minute drive from my childhood house.
Q: Do you have any hobbies?
A: I enjoy playing music—piano, guitar, and singing—and playing any board game or video game I can get my hands on.
Q: Do you have any pets?
A: My partner Anna and I own a cat named Kuma and a rabbit called Pippin, who we lovingly call the little white monster.
Q: What’s your favorite way to spend a day off?
A: Depends on how I’m feeling! If it’s nice outside and I have energy, I enjoy getting out to play a round of disc golf with my friends or going for a walk/hike in the woods and exploring the area. If I’m tired or it’s a rainy day, I enjoy relaxing with a good book, show, or game. Bonus points if it is cold enough to get a fire going in the fireplace.
Q: If you could have dinner with anybody (living or dead), who would it be and why?
A: I’d have to say my grandparents, who unfortunately have all passed away. I only knew one of them well, but I’ve heard so many stories about them from my mom, dad, and extended family growing up that it would be amazing to meet them all. My dad makes a French Canadian meat pie recipe that his mom made for him, and it is my favorite food, so we would dine on that while I chat with the original chefs.
Bonus Question: Do you have any fun science trivia to share?
A: The largest living organism we know of on Earth is a massive honey mushroom growing in a forest in Oregon. It is over 2000 years old and encompasses 2385 acres of land.
Thanks to Alex for these interesting and thoughtful answers! We hope you enjoyed this interview. Stay tuned for more graduate student highlights in the weeks to come!