About Me
I am a Ph.D. candidate at MIT in the Mechanosynthesis and Non-Newtonian Fluids labs, supported by a MathWorks Engineering Fellowship and previously by an NDSEG Fellowship from the US Department of Defense. I work at the intersection of fluid mechanics, solid mechanics, mechanical design, and manufacturing.
On this website, you can learn more about some of my research projects including LEGOfluidics and Oreology, and my selected class projects.
Helpful links:
Google scholar page & ResearchGate Profile & arXiv profile (all my papers should have at least one source that's free to access)
LinkedIn Profile ← this is a good way to contact me (please include a message with a contact request if I don't know you)
Women in Innovation and STEM Database at MIT (WISDM) profile
Bio:
I am co-advised by Gareth McKinley and A. John Hart, both professors in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. During my PhD, I have been developing printing processes for carbon nanotube-based electronics using insights from fluid/solid interactions and complex fluid rheology. Towards these efforts, I have begun the field of Oreology - the study of the flow of sandwich cookie filling - and I have re-developed a family of measurement tools for rheometry, "vanes," using optimized parametric design. I also interned at Volta Labs (a spin-out from the MIT Media Lab) as an R&D engineer working on digital microfluidics. I enjoy mentoring undergraduate researchers in my lab.
Around campus, I'm a certified bartender (eTIPS) and trained MIT mascot, and a founding member of MIT's Sidney-Pacific Walking Club. I am also involved in MIT's Communication Lab and previously with MIT Hyperloop. During early COVID times I created virtual poster sessions and competitions in Gather.town for MIT events.
During my MS degree, supported by the NSF's GRFP fellowship, I studied the mechanics of assembly of LEGO bricks and used this to invent a method of modifying store-bought LEGOs to be a modular, reconfigurable microfluidics platform.
I previously studied Mechanical Engineering and Math at Duke University, where I was a research assistant in Prof. Gabriel López's research lab developing tools and Brownian dynamics simulations for acoustic patterning of microparticles. I was also a research technician in the Chen Research Lab studying nuclear import of proteins contributing to plant gene expression changes in response to light reception, and a microbiology research intern at DuPont - Pioneer (now known as Corteva) studying various bacterial strains and silage inoculants for fungistatic properties.
