Minna Krejci

Minna Krejci is a PhD candidate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, advised by Professor Derk Joester.  She holds a Laboratory Graduate Appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, where she is co-advised by Dr. Stefan Vogt.  Her research focuses on using X-ray microscopy techniques to investigate biological minerals (such as bones, shells, and teeth) and how they are formed in nature.  She is specifically interested in a type of green algae known as desmids, which form highly unusual barium- and strontium-containing biominerals, and is working to understand the mechanisms by which these cells take up barium and strontium ions and sequester them into crystals.  It is her hope that an understanding of these mechanisms will inspire innovative solutions to the difficult problem of removing the dangerous radioisotope strontium-90 from nuclear waste or the environment.  By engineering the growth conditions of the algae, she has shown that it is possible to drastically increase the amount of strontium sequestered in each crystal, introducing the promising possibility of using desmids directly for strontium-90 cleanup.