Columbia, South Carolina, United States
I am proud to attend the University of South Carolina's top-ranked Honors College for my final year of undergraduate study! I have a major in Chemistry and a double minor in Mathematics and Chemical Engineering, and I am pursuing my bachelor's degree with ACS certification. I am also a candidate for Graduation with Leadership Distinction (GLD) in Research, and I am completing an undergraduate certificate in Strategic Thinking & Communications. After graduation, I hope to pursue a JD-PhD, and afterward, establish a career in chemical patent law as an attorney. I am strongly interested in the applications of materials science to sustainable infrastructure. I have explored these topics as an undergraduate assistant in the Tang Polymer Group and in REUs at Coe College and Dartmouth College. Aside from this, I support academic services at two locations on the USC campus. I am a tutor for student-athletes at the Dodie Academic Enrichment Center, and I also serve as a Supplemental Instruction Leader with the Student Success Center.
I have served as an SI Leader in Organic Chemistry for three semesters. I attend lectures alongside enrolled students and facilitate triweekly 50-minute study sessions and midterm reviews, helping students practice challenging concepts outside the classroom.
As part of the NSF Center of Polymers for a Circular Economy, the Tang Polymer Group seeks to design degradable, bio-based polymers as sustainable alternatives to commodity plastics. I am completing my thesis on the synthesis and characterization of sustainable polymers made from α-methylstyrene. My work has contributed to co-authorship on a manuscript in preparation, as well as an upcoming poster presentation at the Spring 2026 ACS conference.
The Dodie's goal is to help student-athletes succeed both in the classroom and on the field and allow them to balance coursework with the demands of their sport. I served as a tutor for student-athletes attending USC for five semesters, where I provided academic support tailored to the unique pressures of these students via drop-in and one-on-one tutoring services for math and chemistry.
The Gonzalez lab focuses on developing metal–organic cages (analogs of metal-organic frameworks) for sustainable heterogeneous catalysis. In my project, I worked to understand how the bipyridine ligands of zirconium cages interacted with catalytically active nickel using NMR and UV-vis spectroscopy. I successfully identified the key difference in how the free ligands coordinated the metal compared to the cage-bound ligands, and I presented these findings in a poster at the Dartmouth Engineering REU symposium.
With the Feller Group, I completed a study of the physical properties of alkali germanate glass, using instrumentation like DSC/TGA, XRD, and pycnometry. This dataset is intended for publication in a standard reference in the newest edition of the textbook “Introduction to Glass Science and Technology” by James E. Shelby. I co-authored a paper that is pending publication, and I delivered three presentations: two seminars for the REU program, as well as an oral presentation at the All-Iowa Glass Conference, a regional Midwest conference.