"Chemistry is a challenging course with a bad reputation. It is a subject that demands a lot of practice. I’m here to help you understand the material and build your confidence.

I double majored in forensic science and forensic chemistry from Utah Valley University (UVU). While I was at UVU, I absolutely fell in love with my organic chemistry class. I enjoyed being able to predict chemical reactivity and using this knowledge to make organic molecules. I quickly came to the realization that I thoroughly enjoyed organic chemistry and wanted to learn more.

I completed my PhD (Organic) at Brigham Young University, Provo (BYU). I explored the impact of site-specific PEGylation (polyethylene glycol) on protein conformational and proteolytic stability. I developed a structure-based method for predicting locations within proteins where PEG increases protein conformational stability and showed that PEG-based stabilization is associated with enhanced proteolytic resistance. Criteria for Selecting PEGylation Sites on Proteins for Higher Thermodynamic and Proteolytic Stability. JACS 2014, 136 (50), 17547-17560.

After my PhD, I joined the lab of Champak Chatterjee at the University of Washington as a post-doc. I used semi-synthetic strategies to generate site-selective modified cancer fighting proteins to study the structure-function of post-translationally modified proteins." less...