Mick Price
Background
Hello, my name is Mick and I am currently a Senior Chemical Engineering at Penn State. I started working in CurtisLab in January of 2020, but COVID-19 cut my semester short, then I took off a year to work a Co-Op with Johnson & Johnson at a plant in Lancaster County, PA that made products from brands including Listerine©, Neutrogena©, Neosporin© and many more. That summer I interned for Merck at their West Point, PA site where I worked in Manufacturing Quality Assurance. Upon graduation, I will be joining Merck in their Animal Health division at a plant in Millsboro, DE.
I enjoy reading, working out, golfing, skiing, watching movies and investing. Movies on my must-watch list include Django: Unchained, The Departed, Superbad, Hackshaw Ridge and Spiderman: Far From Home. I am also an avid fan of Apple Products, so if you need help using a mac or want to get in a Windows vs Mac debate, I am your guy.
Research Project
In CurtisLab, I have been working on the lab’s Chitinase Fungal Inhibition (CFI) assay, which is important for our lab because there is a parallel project taking place to express chitinase in transgenic plants and we need a method of quantifying their inhibition. The assay consists of a growing pathogenic fungus (Rhizoctonia solani) on Potato Dextrose Agar (PDA) plates and six wells 5 mm in diameter containing the chitinase samples.