Mentor: Geoff Coates

Education:

Boston College – B.S. in Chemistry – 09/2011 – 05/2015

Awards and Honors

• 2013 Accepted Participant of the Novartis Next Generation Scientist Event (Cambridge,MA)
• 2014 John Kozarich Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship
• 2014-2015 President and Co-Founder of The American Chemical Society of Boston College
• 2016-2017 Covestro Teaching Excellence Award

Research Experience:

• Worked in the Hoveyda Lab at Boston College developing the first method to reliably install (Z)-alkenes via conjugate addition.  Performed Cu-catalyzed enantioselective conjugate addition reactions with alkenylaluminum nucleophiles for the production of building blocks for natural product synthesis.

Current Research Activities:

My current research, under the guidance of Professor Geoffrey Coates, focuses on the carbonylation epoxides. This transformation utilizes carbon monoxide, a potentially biorenewable small molecule, to afford β-lactones with inversion of stereochemistry. I plan to use careful catalyst design and mechanistic studies to investigate two classes of epoxide starting materials for the production of strained click chemistry substrates and difficult-to-access aldol products.