Research

Postdoctoral research: I did my postdoc in Wolfgang Losert‘s lab at the University of Maryland. More on our specific projects here.

PhD Research: I did my PhD in Doug Durian’s group (co-advised by Jerry Gollub). Here I used microfluidics to study the jamming transition in suspensions of soft colloids. This led to some other collaborations with the groups of Paul Janmey, Arjun Yodh, and Tom Lubensky. Paulo Arratia was also a postdoc in Doug’s group at the time and was heavily involved with some of the work. More on specific projects here. From this time, I learned nano/microfabrication techniques, fluorescence and confocal microscopy, hydrogel synthesis, and light scattering techniques.

Undergraduate research: I did my senior thesis at Bryn Mawr College in the lab of Peter Beckmann. Here I did solid state NMR measurements of large organic molecules. More specifically, the molecules we studied had methyl and tertbutyl groups, which can rotate. The energies of the NMR measurements allowed us to probe these intramolecular motions. We also used chemical modeling software to understand some of our findings.

Other research experiences:
- I did a summer REU at Columbia University in the Turro Lab. Here I learned how to synthesize gold nanoparticles and perform ligand exchange reactions. To characterize the products I learned techniques such as NMR, FT-IR, TEM, and SEM.
- I worked in the Drndic lab at UPenn before starting my PhD research. Here I synthesized nanocrystals, nanotubes, learned AFM, continued to use TEM and SEM, and learned some cleanroom and wafer processing techniques (e-beam lithography, photolithography, etching).