I grew up thinking I wanted to be an artist and actually attended an arts middle/high school. A couple of amazing teachers — Mercily Toledo and Dr. Gary Gray — along the way made me love science and introduced me to research/chemistry as a career path. The highlight of my undergrad experience was the research I got to participate in, and I decided pretty early that grad school was what I wanted to do next. Even though my day-to-day is very science forward, I find that some of the hobbies (photography, graphic design, writing, etc.) I’ve kept up with from my early interest in art have been pretty invaluable to my time here at Duke.
Q: What motivates you?
A: There’s not one thing that motivates me. Sometimes it’s interest in the work — you feel like you’re close to figuring something out and all you want to do is work on it until you figure it out. Sometimes you’ve got a deadline, and that external pressure is pushing you forward. In the later years of my program when I’m feeling unmotivated, I’ve started drafting a paper on what I’m working on and that tends to make it really clear what I’ve got left to do. It also tends to make it seem a bit more manageable than when you’re just loosely keeping track of it mentally. And then sometimes you just feel unmotivated and, in those times, I try to be patient. I’ll negotiate with myself to do some low-effort/fun tasks and usually, if I don’t try to push through the feelings of amotivation, I can get back into things pretty quickly.
Q: Can you summarize your research area?
A: I work on barrier polymers — these are the materials that appear in your chip bags, water bottles, etc. The idea is that they reduce the how quickly small molecules like air and water are able to travel through them allowing your food to last longer. In a medical context, they’re still really useful for packaging but there are also a number of preclinical applications which limited by commercially available materials. So, we’ve developed some degradable barrier polymers which we’ve demonstrated address medical device failures associated with the degradation of water-sensitive electronics. Now, we’re trying to expand our understanding of how these materials actually work to limit permeation as well as apply some data science approaches like Bayesian Optimization to expedite the design process.
Q: What's your favorite part of research?
A: This is a hard question! The people you meet and get to interact with everyday are what first come to mind. I think polymer chemistry and aIM both have such an amazing community that are a lot of fun to be a part of and so interdisciplinary — I feel like I’m always learning something new from the people around me. Along those lines, my research is funded by Avient Corporation which meant that for the last three years I’ve gotten to work with a fantastic team at Avient and get a taste of the industry research perspective. Research really doesn’t happen in a vacuum and I feel so grateful to have so many talented people around me contributing to this work.