These days, it feels as though there is nothing that COVID-19 hasn’t “ruined.” Weddings have been postponed (and re-postponed), schools have moved online and I have not eaten a quesadilla on Washington University campus since February.

Yet for the world of research and academia, things might be running more smoothly than one would anticipate.

Cameron Sargent, a sixth year Ph. D. student in the biochemistry program at Wash. U., elaborated on the framework of how COVID-19 has and has not affected his hours spent in the lab, where he acts as both a researcher and the team’s safety manager.

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Working in Associate Professor Fuzhong Zhang’s lab within the Department of Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering on campus, Sargent and his fellow Ph. D. students perform research centered around synthetic biology within the broader field of biotechnology. Biotechnology refers to the manipulation of living organisms as a means of producing new industrial products, and synthetic biology can be explained as the approaches to making such advancement possible.

This is a direct reflection of Sargent’s undergraduate years at Brigham Young University, where he studied molecular and synthetic biology. Sargent’s interest in science began long before BYU though, and for a while he even wanted to go into medicine. “Then that just kind of—during high school—morphed into research as I took chemistry and biology,” recalls Sargent. It became less of an interest in working with patients and more of an interest in taking the steps before that.

Now Sargent is invested in this Wash. U. research lab, trying to navigate his work amidst COVID-19. “Just like anything else, it’s been a hurdle. All the safety measures with social distancing and everything, fewer people are able to work at a time and you have to space out equipment usage a little bit more than previously,” says Sargent.

Because they were not doing COVID-essential research, Zhang’s lab team had to suspend in-person activity in March. And because this particular type of research does not require much computational effort or collaboration among lab peers, moving online really meant moving to obsoleteness for a bit.

“I mean, it wasn’t really like we could continue doing the research when the lab shut down,” Sargent explains. “We could continue with data analysis, planning, reading literature, kinda coming up with ideas of things to do when we got back. But we couldn’t really, for the most part, continue the research so much.”

For many, this loss of one’s “livelihood” would mean the loss of substance in one’s day-to-day routine. But for Sargent, the pandemic emerged at a surprisingly convenient milestone in his life. He shares, “I actually ended up having a baby like the week before everything shut down.”

“It was actually really good timing. The month that I was going to be home with my baby anyways was the month that COVID shut the lab down so…It is nice to be more at home,” Sargent says. Even if he was not always directly caretaking and might have had some virtual work to complete, being physically at home enabled a lot more flexibility.

And by early June, Sargent and his fellow researchers were able to get back in the lab.

The reopening stage began at an allowance of 30% capacity. “We divided up 30% of the normal time and scheduled the week out so that everybody had shifts and whatnot,” explains Sargent. “And just as we’ve ramped up to the second stage, it just means people get more shifts.”

This also worked out well in the context of prioritizing who needed an in-person space, especially back in June. “We had a couple of people who were kind of working on papers, dissertations, things like that—so they just stayed home that whole time, since they didn’t need to be in the lab.” The status of Wash. U. undergraduate researchers in the lab, however, was, and continues to be, more uncertain.

The few undergraduate students who were on the team when COVID brought everything to a halt are still out for now, and it is unlikely that additional students will be joining anytime soon.

“Taking in new undergrads,” Sargent admits. “I mean that’s a bit of a challenge. With social distancing—especially if somebody’s coming in without any research experience—it’s hard to get them up and running with having to be 6 plus feet away from them at all times.”

The situation is of course not ideal, but it is not disastrous either. Taking every obstacle in stride, Sargent and his fellow Ph. D. researchers have managed to mostly return to normalcy—or at least as normal as things can get right now.