Sarah Robinson Email & Phone Number

I am a chemist who has worked on interdisciplinary projects ranging from organic synthesis, electrochemistry, spectroscopy, and microfabrication.At Carnegie Mellon University, I graduated with a joint B.S./M.S. degree in Chemistry. I enjoyed science with a business mindset and pursued an additional option in Management, taking courses ranging from Kitchen Chemistry to Entrepreneurship for Scientists. I took this business interest to my internship at Procter & Gamble, and I learned that I valued customer-focused work, where the time between the work and impacting customers was much shorter than traditional academic research. I was tasked to cook various food dishes and create demos showing the competitive advantage of their dish category (i.e. Dawn and Gain). I learned about utilizing the understanding of the science to design visualizations that would be compelling for customers and consumers. From my experience with an internship in industry, I knew that I would eventually like to have a leadership role and knew that attending graduate school would strengthen my skillset. I started on a project with Dr. Herman Sintim and Dr. Steve Semancik fabricating microdevices to investigate innovative methods to screen for potential new drugs. Through this project, I had the opportunity to work with teams across several divisions at The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The project focus shifted, and I had to pivot and learn device fabrication to optimize our platform which also increased the lifetime of the devices. This opportunity allowed me to learn over a dozen tools, network with other users, work with staff to troubleshoot tool issues, and resulted in fabricating an optimized platform which was published in a peer-reviewed journal. My relationships with others at NIST and leveraging their knowledge played a key role in my growth as a scientist and the success of the project.I returned to NIST as a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Nikolai Klimov on the development and nanofabrication of micro-/nano gratings-based devices and structures for next-generation far-field neutron interferometry. I then transitioned to a Research Chemist in the Sensor Science Division at NIST where I continued to focus on the process development and fabrication of gratings to support the INFER collaboration team. Although my project applications have ranged from biosensing to neutron physics, I enjoy the fabrication process development and working with others to design and build of a range of sensors and devices.

Listed skills include Microfabrication, Electrochemistry, Leadership, Thin Film Characterization, and 7 others.