URI’s Buddini Karawdeniya explains work with ‘nanostructures’, reflects on move from native Sri Lanka
When Buddini Karawdeniya was a middle school student in Sri Lanka, she didn’t want to make the same, boring atom model that her peers constructed year after year. Instead, she did something different, arranging lids of different sizes as energy levels along with paper clips as electrons to create a 3D model of a nitrogen atom her teacher had never seen before.
“She was so ecstatic,” recalls Karawdeniya, who is now on the verge of defending a Ph.D dissertation for the Department of Chemistry at URI. “She said, ‘Buddini, don’t stop at just a degree.”
“I didn’t know what she meant at that point, but after completing my college degree, I felt, ‘I can do something more,’ so why not?”
So, Karawdeniya and her husband, Nuwan, took the 30-hour trip from their home in 2012 to Rhode Island, working under RI C-AIM researcher and associate professor of Chemistry Dr. Jason R. Dwyer to study the science behind ‘nanostructured sensing platforms’ that can detect molecules of chemical or biological origin, from nitrates in water to biomarkers in the human body.
Karawdeniya has been fabricating such platforms as part of her dissertation for a technique called SERS, or Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy.
“The Raman signal by itself is too weak, but a metal layer as thin as a few nanometers in the vicinity of the molecule can enhance the Raman signal by a million-fold,” she explains.
Figuring out the techniques and support materials to make specific gold nanostructure shapes and sizes needed to fabricate chip-like surfaces called ‘substrates’ to identify certain molecules through SERS is a major part of the scientific process, however. Once fabricated, researchers can add a sample onto or soak the chip to take readings.
“They are all very sensitive and can detect very low concentrations,” says Karawdeniya. “We can custom-make different shapes and sizes of nanostructures by using the same technique on different supports like silicon nitride, paper, and silicon. We use a technique called ‘electroless plating‘, and we don’t need sophisticated instruments for it, not even a power supply.”
The benefit of such nanostructures, and the reason Karawdeniya is collaborating with Dwyer and others on RI C-AIM, is to develop new substrates which can rapidly detect specific nutrients, contaminants and biomolecules in the waters of Narragansett Bay.
For Karawdeniya, conducting research has been the easy part of living in a new country thanks to Dwyer and her colleagues.
“Everyone has been supportive here,” she lauds. “[Dwyer] is a tough but great mentor with high standards and superb research ideas. He pays so much attention to his grad students and their future. I am so grateful that I work for him.”
Adjusting to life in the States, however, was a little more of a challenge. In the U.S., professors are more approachable and helped Karawdeniya, who did not know of many Sri Lankans living in Rhode Island at the time, settle, she says.
“When I went to the supermarket, I was like, ‘wow, this is huge’,” she recalls. “I remember trying new food was an interesting experience. I was used to 80°F weather throughout the year before I came here, so cold weather was an entirely new experience for me. Living in a new place by myself, finding furniture, finding transportation and adjusting to a new culture took some time, but not as long as I expected thanks to the few Sri Lankans we met and our host family Mr. and Mrs. Curtis.”
After Karawdeniya defends her dissertation, she wants to pursue postdoctoral studies or gain industrial experience. Although unsure about when she will return to Sri Lanka, Karawdeniya hopes to eventually teach in college and use knowledge of nanostructures and Raman sensing to help solve environmental and medical issues back home.
“If [students] learn the right concepts and get the right inspiration, that feels so good,” she says. “I would love to develop paper-based sensors, which in a third world country like Sri Lanka, would go a long way.”
“To actually give something to the country, it is an awesome research field.”
The Rhode Island Consortium for Coastal Ecology Assessment, Innovation and Modeling is a five-year, $20 million initiative funded through the RI NSF EPSCoR program seeking to develop a technological infrastructure to predict and respond to the changing interactions between chemicals and lifeforms in the waters of Narragansett Bay.
For more information, https://web.uri.edu/rinsfepscor.
Rhode Island EPSCoR is funded by the National Science Foundation under EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Award #OIA-1655221 (Sept. 2017-Aug. 2022). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.