Kinnos is a startup focused on creating products with the intention of improving disinfection processes to revolutionize infection prevention. Kinnos was founded in response to the Ebola crisis, and since then has worked to expand their products to help protect healthcare workers and patients in a wider variety of settings. Their flagship product, Highlight, is a disinfectant additive that colorizes bleach solutions to ensure proper coverage and then fades in the appropriate contact time. This summer, I served as a Technical Intern on the Kinnos R&D team to help optimize formulas for Kinnos’s proprietary Highlight color disinfection technology. As a research and development intern, I worked in the lab on experiment design, testing, and data collection and analysis. As healthcare-associated infections impact around 1.7 million patients yearly, the Highlight Wipes technology has the potential to significantly improve hospital disinfection processes and accordingly decrease the number of associated infections.

chemical engineering major, I not only study the basic sciences but focus on how to apply those subjects to everyday life. That is precisely what I did at Kinnos. In the lab, I was able to leverage my chemistry knowledge to address problems that arose in the formulation process and inform new formulation ideas. Additionally, my problem-solving mindset derived from my engineering coursework was used to help troubleshoot issues in the lab from a solutions-oriented perspective. In engineering, there is a large focus on product output and efficiency and I think this was an integral mindset to have in a product development laboratory.

One challenge I faced was having to figure out how to prioritize development goals. There are many goals associated with developing a product and when working with a deadline, it is not always feasible to achieve all of these goals. Additionally, it was often difficult to consistently develop new ideas when experiments were not working. To overcome this, I really had to think about how to reorient myself in the given problem. Often it was necessary to approach the problem from another, unexpected perspective. It was necessary to leverage past experiences and associate the given product goals with product functionalities that I already knew existed. While many products have different intended uses, oftentimes the underlying science is the same. It was very interesting to see the scientific connections between so many different commercial products and learning how to utilize various seemingly unrelated industries in my own work.

I am extremely grateful to Kinnos for such an exciting summer. Previously I had only conducted academic research which requires a very different approach. In academia, there is a large focus on developing scientific understanding of the research subject. In a product development lab like Kinnos, there is a much larger focus on output. This was my first time working in such a lab, and it was incredibly valuable to learn how to orient myself in a scientific space while focusing on outcomes. In this type of lab, you get to see the effects of your work almost immediately which is very exciting. By the end of the summer, I was able to see tangible progress towards my goals. From this experience, I know that I definitely want to work in a space that has a similar mentality as it is extremely rewarding.