Research

I joined Omar Saleh's lab in October 2026 as an undergraduate researcher. The group studies how single polymers like DNA stretch under very small forces, measured with magnetic tweezers, and builds materials out of DNA that assembles itself. My mentors in the lab are Sylvia Green and Ziqi Li.

Mentored by Isabel Pastor del Campo and Lukas Kühnemann, of the Small Biosystems Lab. The abstract, as submitted:

Most of what we know about molecules comes out of averages of over 10²³ of them, smoothing out the complications, individual jumps, pauses and failures that make molecular behaviour unpredictable in specifics. Single-molecule force spectroscopy lets us do thermodynamics one object at a time, pulling apart a DNA hairpin while force and distance are recorded. With this talk I'll follow a measurement from the bench to the number. How optical tweezers operate, how they are built, and how an irreversible pull's force-distance curve becomes a free energy measurement through fluctuation theorems. Based on a six-week research stay in the group of Fèlix Ritort, Universitat de Barcelona, where I learned the instrument, built the chambers these experiments run in, and got to operate the optical tweezers.

A summer stay in Fèlix Ritort's Small Biosystems Lab, working with optical and magnetic tweezers. These instruments grab a single molecule and pull on it, so you can measure the forces that fold and unfold it.

I worked with Isabel Pastor del Campo and Lukas Kühnemann, and contributed CAD design and 3D-printed parts for the lab's instruments, including microfluidics chambers.

I tested whether a classical Cepheid's period predicts its absolute magnitude, using Large Magellanic Cloud data calibrated against Gaia parallaxes and a regression analysis. Leavitt's relation still holds on modern data.

How layer height and printing temperature change where printed PLA breaks under tension. I printed and tensile-tested 180 samples, then built a model that predicts their strength from the print settings.

I used the same printers that had made robot parts for CiberEdu.

I built analytical functions for a planetary transit from the occulted area alone, integrated them, and tested them against observations of the 2012 transit of Venus.