(2u) Engineering Diagnostics for Mental Health Monitoring

My long-standing desire to develop mental health diagnostics while inspiring students to achieve their own goals has driven my pursuit of a career in academia. Due to the multi-variate nature of mental health illnesses, I obtained an interdisciplinary education that would best prepare me to tackle the questions I am interested in. I obtained my B.S. in Physics from Haverford College in 2013, worked from 2013-2015 at the National Institutes of Health, and obtained my Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2021 from Boston University (BU). At BU, I worked under Professor Catherine Klapperich to develop electrochemical biosensors for point-of-care diagnostics. In doing so, I invented affordable gold leaf electrodes that could be made without specialized equipment; I combined them with a CRISPR-based assay to detect human papillomavirus (HPV) from clinical samples. This body of work was the first demonstration that gold leaf could be used for biosensing purposes. Since 2021, I have worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Engineering with Professor Ariel Furst at MIT, where I have worked on a number of projects that span biosensing, coordination chemistry and synthetic biology.

Research Interests

My interdisciplinary research experience, which spans physics, chemical engineering and biomedical engineering have given me the diverse skillset needed to lead an interdisciplinary research group. I aspire to lead a research group that tackles complex problems, such as building quantitative tools that can (1) diagnose mental health illness and (2) predict what psychiatric medications an individual will respond best to. I will build on my vast mentoring experience to hire hard-working students and post-docs; I will provide them with the guidance and resources they need to reach their full potential. Given my track record of success in various fields, I am confident we can make invaluable contributions to the field of mental health diagnostics.

Teaching Statement

I credit much of my success to the invaluable support and mentorship of my advisors, past and present. Their care, patience and teaching skills gave me the resources I needed to be successful while also showing me how to best support the next generation of trainees. During graduate school, I had the pleasure of being a teaching assistant for two semesters. In the past six years, I have mentored a total of 21 combined high school, undergraduate and graduate students on various projects that have resulted in numerous publications. I have learned that students have a wide range of interests and experience, and I have practiced tailoring my mentorship style to best fit the needs of a particular student. This has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my career, and one that I aspire to build on as an assistant professor, both in the lab and in the classroom. My formal training in physics and biomedical engineering, combined with my experience working in a chemical engineering lab, has prepared me to teach chemical engineering courses; these courses include, but are not limited to, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, mass transport, kinetics and bioengineering. I would be very grateful for the opportunity to teach these courses.