Research
Chemistry is endlessly fascinating. The fact that everything in the known universe is composed of combinations of 92 building blocks will never not amaze me. There is so much humans have discovered about how nature is (dis)ordered and how we can utilize these building blocks to solve the world's problems. But as much as we have innovated on technological advances, we have polluted our surroundings at the expense of the world's health. My research interests focus on projects that will improve our health and the health of the environment.
Early-Stage Drug Design
My undergraduate research at Muhlenberg College was focused on developing novel therapeutics to treat neuroinflammation, one of the possible contributors to Alzheimer's disease (AD). AD is a debilitating neurodegenerative disease affecting 416+ million people worldwide, and the efficacy of recently-approved therapeutics is modest and contested.(1) Our team developed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) derivatives designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and target neuroinflammation. I helped design and synthesize the novel derivatives and led the development and validation of plasma stability and plasma protein binding in vitro assays. I presented our group's findings at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Diego in 2025. While I am unable to discuss much more at this point in time, you can read more about our work here!
(1) Gustavsson et al. Alzheimers Dement. 2023, 19 (2), 658-670.
Anti-Fouling Coatings
At the University of Michigan, I probed the interfaces of polysiloxane oil/elastomer mixtures to examine how surface structure affects fouling-release (FR) capabilities. Marine biofouling is when micro and macroorganisms attach themselves to vessels in water such as ships. As more and more organisms adhere to the ship's hull, the slower it sails and the more fuel is consumed to reach the same speed. This releases hundreds of million of tons of greenhouse gases, a major contributor to climate change.(1) Polysiloxanes, or repeating chains of Si-O groups, have been widely studied for their FR ability, or the ability to wash away weakly-adhered organisms, but not much was known on the molecular level about how the siloxane surface responds to organism adhesion.
(1) Gomez et al. Langmuir 2025, 41 (3), 1985-1996.
Our group used an advanced analytical technique called sum frequency generation vibrational spectroscopy (SFG), an instrument that specializes in probing interfaces between bulk materials. We determined that flexible copolymerized siloxane oils increased surface hydration and decreased biofouling. We used a linear protein called fibrinogen as a model microorganism, and we found that fibrinogen bended as it adhered to the polysiloxane surface. Ultimately, the polymer mixtures reduced fouling of fibrinogen due to polymer surface rearrangements and flexibility, which had not been determined previously to our knowledge. I wrote the introduction and collected and analyzed SFG data for our publication in Langmuir. You can read more about the project and our results here!
