The diversi?cation of the health-related work force is a crucial component of not only increasing inclusiveness, but also opening up the ?eld to a more diverse set of perspectives. With the shutdown of the PIs laboratory due to the COVID19 pandemic, all members of the group were forced to work from home. I did not tell students to stop charging hours to the grant. Ceasing pay and suspending work altogether would have placed the minority students in the lab in a very precarious position. In addition, this came at a crucial moment in the project, where ?nal fabrication and experiments were to take place. This was budgeted and planned to occur Spring/Summer 2020. Due to the shutdown, we are essentially three months of payroll short from completing the project. In the supplemental aim, we will build and test graphene nanogap devices. We will use a novel planar approach that we have developed under the parent R21 award.
We aim to meet critical milestones that will prepare us for applying for SBIR and R01 funding.
The ability to sequence a single DNA molecule completely by simply reading its bases is a grand challenge in biotechnology. Several techniques are aiming to meet that challenge, but there are fundamental limits to how close they may be able to get. Here, we aim to meet a critical milestone in demonstrating we can sequence with graphene nanogaps.
