Education
I graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with my B.S. in Biochemistry, and a minor in Mathematics.
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I am currently enrolled at Duquesne University, working to get my Ph.D. in Chemistry.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
IUP is a small school, but had an outstanding chemistry department made up of brilliant teachers and scientists.
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We were encouraged to begin research as early as possible. I worked with Dr.s Charles Lake and Avijita Jain on solid-state synthesis of Fe and Ru photo-active complexes, which we characterized by neutron diffraction at Argonne National Lab.
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Additionally, IUP's chemistry curriculum allowed students to take at least two classes in every major branch of chemistry, including biochemistry, inorganic, and physical. Although not required, it was highly encouraged, and greatly prepared us for graduate school.
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Finally, most of the faculty at IUP taught an advanced, special topics class based on their research. I was fortunate to take two: Crystallography and Modern Diffraction, and Protein Engineering and Design.
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It was in large part due to these classes, my research experience, and the encouragement from the faculty at IUP that convinced me to go on to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemistry.
Good friends from the chem major at IUP. All four of us went on to graduate school in chemistry.
Duquesne University
When I joined the Ph.D. program at Duquesne University, I was not expecting to work with Mass Spectrometry, or anything in the gas-phase, nor had I worked with any heavy metals. But my soon-to-be advisor, Dr. Michael J. van Stipdonk, made it all sound so fascinating, and his lab had an opening. After my first rotation, I was hooked. That first year, I spent my time learning how to make novel U-ions, and brushing up on organo-metallic chemistry and instrumental analysis. I was like a kid in a candy store, generating more ions than I could keep track of. Every one of those ions had novel reactivity to observe, first with water and oxygen that were ever present within our instrument, but also chemical reagents that we purposefully bled into the trap. We jokingly called it "the Zoo."
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Disaster struck when Dr. van Stipdonk, MVS as he was familiarly known to us, told me I had to learn how to model all these reactions with density functional theory (DFT). It was a bit overwhelming at first, but Duquesne has a rather robust cohort of computational chemists, with Dr.s Evanseck, van Stipdonk, and Montgomery, who are all quite experienced in the field. Thanks to their guidance, and Duquesne's supercomputer, Ghengis, I was able to generate the data we needed.
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Since then, we have continued to generate data on novel organometallic ions, containing metals such as the Group II alkali earth metals, a myriad of the transition metals, including the whole first row, and several main group metals such as Al, Ga, Sn, Pb, and Bi. Not only those, but also small organic molecules, whose chemistry is well known, but fragmentation patterns are less so.
We regularly travel out to visit the Free Electron Laser for Infra-Red eXperiments (FELIX) at Radboud University in Nijmegen, NED. There, we are able to generate many of the same ions we can at home, and subject them to IR radiation, causing multi-photon dissociation, known as IRMPD. This allows us to collect IR spectra of our ions, further characterizing these unique and beautiful species.
As I wrap up my dissertation, I have focused primarily on the unique types of bonds I can generate with U when it is in the 3+ or 4+ oxidation states. These are relatively understudied systems, and we have discovered a reliable means of generating them to help solve that problem. I am excited to conclude this chapter of my education and pursue further research opportunities, wherever they may take me.
Experimental set up at Duquesne, including our 2D ion-trap mass spectrometer, and our reagent manifold for ion-molecule reactions
Experimental set up at FELIX, including their 3D ion trap mass spec, and the light source from FELIX, which can be seen on top
I am actively looking for Post-Doctoral Opportunities
Please let me know if you are interested.