Contact Info

MIT Department of Chemistry
77 Massachusetts Ave.
Cambridge, MA 02139
Fax (617) 253-7030

Education

University of Southern California
B.S. in Mathematics and Chemistry, 2007

Research Projects

• Construction of free energy surfaces for electron transfer reactions in condensed phases:
  By coupling a constrained DFT approach to diabatization of electronic states with a polarizable QM/MM molecular dynamics procedure for sampling configuration space, we can parametrize free energy surfaces for electron transfer reactions.
• Fluorescence quenching by photoinduced electron transfer in a Zn²⁺ chemical sensor
  A common motif for visual detection of a particular chemical (the analyte) in a sample is to employ a fluorescent chemical sensor whose fluorescence intensity is altered by binding to the analyte. In many cases, this behavior is governed by a photoinduced electron transfer fluorescence quenching mechanism. We are using time-dependent DFT and constrained DFT to study the plausibility of this mechanism in a Zn²⁺ sensor.