Lead a company in the innovative sustainable materials space. Successfully secured >$3M in grant funding. Established and maintained product development collaborations with leading materials companies. Set product development strategy and led execution from conception to commercialization strategy.

Adjunct instructor for NSF I-Corps Hub Northeast Region Propelus program. Teach/mentor deep tech early stage entrepreneurs through an intensive introduction to customer discovery and business model assessment.

Advisors: Tomasz Kowalewski and David YaronCollaborators: Krzysztof Matyjaszewski, Anna Balazs, Shawn Litster, Carmel Majidi, Rongchao Jin, Jay Whitacre, and Stefan BernhardProject: Improving and characterizing polymer-derived carbons for fuel cell applications• Identified key material properties that determine catalytic activity for carbons in oxygen reduction and hydrogen evolution reactions.• Developed a nitrogen bound platinum on carbon (Pt/C) and identified the binding site of Pt when incorporated into a doped carbon system using x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and modeling by density functional theory (DFT).• Used DFT to investigate binding energies of hydrogen for various N-doped carbon models to identify possible active sites for hydrogen evolution and CO2 reduction.• Identified limitation to increasing surface area by lowering the overall length of the block-copolymer using a combination of x-ray diffraction, Porod analysis of small angle x-ray scattering, N2 adsorption isotherms, and analysis of transmission electron microscopy images.• Other methods used for this project include atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, cyclic voltammetry, and small angle x-ray scattering.Project: Developing gel polymer architectures for soft robotics• Leading an interdisciplinary collaboration between chemistry and robotics research groups to design a soft gel polymer system that can house and mechanically interface with electronic components.• Experimental methods used include dynamic mechanical analysis, thermal analysis, rheology.Project: Modeling stability and transport properties in anion exchange membranes for hydroxide fuel cells• Identified degradation pathways for tetraaminophosphonium-based membranes by hydroxide attack, using DFT.

Project: Developed a nickel-thiolate cluster water reducing catalyst for hydrogen fuel production• Discovered a new synthetic route to nickel-sulfur nanoclusters.• Characterized the clusters by proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), 2D correlation spectroscopy (COSY) NMR, electrospray ionization (ESI) mass spectrometry (MS), and thermogravimetric analysis (TGA).• Used the nanoclusters as highly active water reducing catalysts in photo-driven hydrogen evolution.Project: Synthesized and characterized gold alloy nanoparticles• Synthesized atomically precise Cu and Ag doped M¬xAu¬25-x(SR)18 nanoparticles.• Characterized the nanoparticles by ultraviolet-visible spectrophotometry and matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization MS.• Using fragmentation analysis, identified the specific location of the metals doped into the nanoparticles.