I’m a Chemical Engineering Ph.D. student in the Schatz and Mirkin groups where I work on a variety of topics related to aluminum nanoparticle syntheses and exploiting their collective optical properties for plasmon-driven photochemistry. 

I was born in Baltimore and grew up in Southeastern Texas. I received a B.A. in History and a B.S. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from Rice University in 2020. My undergraduate research spanned both disciplines: on the history end of things, I studied how religion and politics intertwined at the interfaces of multiple cultures and peoples – particularly spanning Central, South, and East Asia from the 12th to the 18th centuries. Funnily enough, my chemical engineering research also involved interfacial phenomena in Lisa Biswal’s group, where I focused on tuning the surface wettability of carbonate colloids for enhanced oil recovery. 

As a graduate student, it’s weird to say that I have free time – but when I can, I enjoy long-distance running, reading books, playing video games (particularly in the Pokémon franchise), and drinking copious amounts of tea.