Department: Chemical and Biological Engineering Faculty Adviser: Lilia Xie Year of Study: G3 Undergraduate School: University of Toronto Undergraduate Major: Biochemistry & Material Science
I m a 3rd year PhD student in Chemical and Biological Engineering. I grew up in Sarnia, Ontario on the shores of Lake Huron before moving to sunny Singapore in middle school. After experiencing years of constant summer, I ve come to appreciate the changing seasons here at Princeton. As an undergraduate, I worked on a range of fun projects from peptidomimetic polymers to soft robotic muscles. Outside of the lab, I enjoy cooking (which I consider more art than chemistry) and playing board games with my friends.
I once interned at the zoo for about a month and was in charge of feeding everything from horseshoe crabs to sloths!
My research focuses on low-dimensional coordination polymers, which are atomically-thin materials with an inorganic core and molecular sheath (organic ligands) that can control whether they grow into 1D chains or 2D sheets. These materials could have interesting magnetic and quantum properties that would allow them to be used for more energy-efficient computing and data storage. Existing research has focused mainly on the structure and properties of the inorganic core, which tends to be chemically unstable and challenging to synthesize. I am currently developing a better way to build and protect these structures by customizing the molecular layer around them. Once synthesized, I use X-ray diffraction to study the structure of these materials and measure their magnetic response by cooling them down to as low as 0.3 K in a strong magnetic field.
Interested in participating in Summer 2027 ReMatch+ program.
