Mentor: Mikail Abbasov

Education:

Boston College – B.S., Biochemistry (2022)

Awards and Honors

• John Kozarich Undergraduate Research Fellowship (2021), Boston College

Research Experience:

• Undergraduate researcher (2020-2022), Eranthie Weerapana lab (Chemical Biology, Boston College)

Current Research Activities:

Covalent modifications of proteins are an important tool for probing biological systems. Carbamoyl fluorides, as latent fluorine-containing electrophiles, present a privileged functional group that shows tempered reactivity toward nucleophilic amino acids and are kinetically stable, yet remain largely unexplored in biological contexts. My research aims to explore carbamoyl fluorides, and their reactivity toward proteogenic amino acids to covalently modify native proteins in complex biological systems. Leveraging the unique reactivity of carbamoyl fluorides with proteinaceous nucleophiles enables the selective tagging and subsequent enrichment of target proteins for proteomic-based studies which aim to expand our understanding of the nucleophilic proteome and its role in cellular processes, disease mechanisms, and drug discovery.