Research

I work in computational materials science and chemistry leveraging new techniques in machine learning to understand and predict the behavior of molecular systems accurately and efficiently.

Materials Intelligence Research

September 2023 — Present

With Prof. Boris Kozinsky in Harvard Engineering , I use machine learning and molecular dynamics simulation to acquire atomistic insights into materials and molecules.

The YSL Lab

January 2021 — August 2023

With Prof. Yu-Shan Lin in Tufts Chemistry , I used molecular dynamics with enhanced sampling to understand the relationships between sequence and structure in cyclic peptides.

To push the boundaries of high throughput structural analysis, the lab uses machine learning to learn the structural ensemble of cyclic peptides observed in MD so that we can replace the need to perform MD after training an ML model ( J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2023 , Chem. Sci. 2021 ). These models represent a multiple order-of-magnitude speedup in the calculation of a cyclic peptide's structural ensemble. With this technology, we can begin to enable structure-based de novo cyclic peptide drug design.

The Staii Lab

May 2020 — December 2020

With Prof. Cristian Staii in Tufts Physics and Astronomy, I developed theoretical models to explain why neuron axons tend to align themselves with and grow along periodic patterns in their substrate ( PLOS One. 2021 , Biophys. J. 2022). I also helped show that the dielectric properties of nanoparticles can be measured with electrostatic force microscopy (EFM) ( AIP Adv. 2020 ).

The Kaplan Lab

May 2019 — March 2020

With Dr. Jugal Sahoo in Prof. David Kaplan's lab in Tufts Biomedical Engineering , I worked to create silk-fibroin-based hydrogels and understand how their physical and chemical properties and biocompatibility changed when prepared with different methods ( Biomater. Sci. 2020 ) and functionalized with different sugars ( Adv. Biol. 2021 ).