PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University
Becoming a Faculty First-Look Fellow is something of a homecoming for me, because I graduated from NYU Tandon in 2020 with a combined B.S/M.S degree in Chemical Engineering before entering Johns Hopkins for my doctoral program. You can imagine how excited I am to see everyone; I still consider Ingrid Parades, who now directs the General Engineering program, and Ayaskanta Sahu, who leads the Hybrid Nanomaterials Lab, to be role models and mentors.
At Johns Hopkins, I’m now working with Professor Howard Katz to study polymers, which provide a more sustainable method of energy storage than other materials, and I’m also designing inorganic-organic hybrid devices for sensing and energy storage.
I had become interested in materials science early on, because my mother was a materials scientist. Along with my father, who was a mechanical engineer, they developed engineered stone for use in building projects. I was interning at a manufacturing company when I came to realize how much waste was being generated by some of those processes and turned my attention to sustainability issues.
I’ll be finishing my doctoral studies in around 2025 and will need to plan my next steps, so the Faculty First-Look program should be enormously valuable in shaping my goals and helping me attain them. Seeing all my old Tandon colleagues is also a great bonus.