A redo of a classic lab-intensive course explores fun new ways of conducting research
Areg Danagoulian, associate professor at MIT NSE, has been teaching the lab-heavy course, Principles of Nuclear Radiation Measurement and Protection, for a while now. This year, he decided to revamp the class. “It was time to throw away some experiments that were not as educationally valuable and add some new exciting ones,” Danagoulian says.
He found a candidate for one of the “new exciting” experiments through an unexpected turn of events. A while ago the Boston-based Russian community was worried that the products being sold from Ukraine and Belarus in local Russian stores, might have lingering traces of radiation as aftereffects of the Chernobyl disaster. “When people were like ‘is this food radioactive, I thought this question is really easy for us to answer, Danagoulian remembers. At around the same time, he read a paper written by Duke University researchers about radiation dating techniques that involved measuring the presence of Cesium-137 in honey from eastern states like Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia, and more. Only two events produce Cesium-137: the detonation of nuclear weapons or nuclear accidents. The paper found half the samples to have traces of radioactive cesium.
A collaboration with the SHED
Inspired by these events, Danagoulian figured students might enjoy testing honey from areas near Chernobyl for evidence of contamination. In figuring out the hows of such testing, Danagoulian decided to collaborate with Tolga Durak, Founding Director and Principal Investigator at the Safety Health Environmental Discovery (SHED) lab at MIT and a Lecturer at NSE. The lab has a range of equipment such as liquid scintillation counters (LSCs) with both beta and alpha spectroscopy capabilities for measuring low-energy radiation and High-Purity Germanium (HPGe) semiconductor detector for identification and quantification of unknown radioactive samples, that will help.
Florian Chavagnat, research scientist at NSE, developed the lab manual for the experiment, after discussions with Chris Sain of MIT’s Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) office and Mitch Galanek, Officer and Director of Radiation Protection Program at EHS. (EHS is the core affiliated department for the SHED). Chavagnat’s lab manual included guidelines for sessions and problem exercises for the students to do theoretical radiation calculations on paper.
Durak is excited about the experiment helping to highlight the stigma around radiation. “There’s a potential environmental justice component involved here since a lot of underrepresented communities live in contaminated lands. Educating the students about misperceptions around radiation is especially exciting,” he says.
And it was not just the Chernobyl-area honey that got tested. “A very appealing aspect of this experiment is the samples we studied, things which are rather common and not necessarily suspected for containing radio-nuclides,” Chavagnat says. These include honey from different regions of the world like Chernobyl (Ukraine); Georgia (US); and France. Danagoulian contributed leftover ash from grilled meat and dried mushroom from New England. “Any radioactivity we see is most likely the remains of nuclear testing around the world from the last century,” Chavagnat says.
A how-to primer on research
Zooming out from the honey experiment, the course helps students understand how to work with advanced equipment. “Whether it’s through lessons in using instruments, troubleshooting the equipment, or understanding anomalies, we can make sure that the students are getting a sense of how you actually conduct this testing in real settings,” Durak says.
The 15-unit Principles of Nuclear Radiation Measurement and Protection course, one of the few mandatory ones at NSE, is not an easy lift and Danagoulian acknowledges it’s hard on students. Undergraduates complete a series of four experiments, each of which spans two to three weeks. Graduate students have to conduct five.
Even if experiments anchor the course, students learn more than the basics of labwork. They first learn statistics and the underlying theory behind the experiments. “They learn how to do data analysis, how to work in a lab, how to write up results in a journal article format, and then cap it all with oral presentations that emulate a conference presentation,” Danagoulian says. “It’s like a dry run for real-world research,” he adds.
Students come away knowing that it’s okay to be frustrated when working in a lab, but that it’s important to ask for help, Danagoulian adds. Lab-based courses veer away from traditional blackboard-based teaching. “Here you can have ten concepts working together at a time,” Danagoulian says, “but eventually you become more confident and that’s how you move from being a student to a researcher.”
A focus on interdisciplinary research
The course emphasizes the interdisciplinary nature of today’s research. “We’re expanding the bandwidth of these students so they can see that there’s a whole range of activities from different fields related to these experiments. We have mechanical engineers working on biological materials, a lot of people in different disciplines working with lasers and ionizing and non-ionizing radiation,” Durak says. “Recognition of such a holistic approach helps the students become better scientists and engineers.”
Durak points out that MIT has a rich history of research in nuclear science and engineering. “Hopefully the collaboration with the SHED is developing another bridge to other disciplines and students from other majors. Beautiful things happen when we have this mosaic of diversity, background interests and disciplines,” Durak says.
Danagoulian agrees. “Nuclear engineering would not be possible without a collaboration between people who understand mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, economics, computation. Different sciences and technologies have to come together to make nuclear engineering possible,” he says.
Conducting experiments in a collaboration with the SHED enables students to test the waters out of their comfort zone and prepare to work in novel environments in the future, Danagoulian says. “It gives them the opportunity to understand what the world is about more broadly and see what other people work on. And being curious and creative, they can then come up with new ideas. The course is about both short and long-term gain,” he adds.
As for the honey experiment, students have been excited to find out the dose of radiation they would get from eating the Chernobyl-area honey. The answer has often been surprising: One team that performed the experiment found two pounds of honey gives you the same dose of radiation as three bananas.
November 2024. Written by Poornima Apte. Photo by Lillie Paquette.
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