About-Me

Picture: My flash talk presentation at the minority opportunities in research (MORE) programs UCLA Lake Arrowhead Retreat.

Some Background on Me:

I am a graduate student in Chemistry at California State University, Los Angeles working in Dr. Olaseni Sode’s research lab in computational chemistry. I studied Biology and biochemistry as my undergraduate major at Cal State LA. My long term career plan is become a research scientist exploring the molecular basis of biological reactions, exploring electronic, and vibrational structures in the subfield of theoretical chemistry utilizing quantum computational methods, quantum molecular dynamics, and classical molecular dynamics with additional explorations in using machine learning and neural networks to accelerate these calculations. I find that exploring the fundamental nature of chemistry is a rewarding experience with vast consequences for the scientific community. This website serves as my personal accountability tracker, where I plan to document a wealth of information about my career experiences. Additionally, it will function as a repository for the knowledge and research that I come across.

My Research Experience:

My first break in research was via the lab of Dr. Yong Ba in 2016 where I explored the synthesis and characterization of beta-cyclodextrin dimers for the inclusion of anti-cancer drugs like sorafenib. Later, I concurrently joined the laboratory of Dr. Micheal Hayes where I investigated the VAC1 knockout of pentatricopeptide repeats in S. lycopersicum and the establishment of CRISPR Cas9 methods/protocols in glyphosate resistance so that the laboratory could have a pipeline protocol for future CRISPR explorations. I was inspired to join his lab based on casual hallway conversations that I would have with him while I worked as an assistant at the university’s office of Environmental Health and Safety.

I joined Dr. Sode’s lab in Fall 2020 and I graduated with my BS in 2021. Thanks to Dr. Sode’s mentorship, I learned the basics of quantum mechanics (enrolling also in this class), and computational chemistry. This kindled a great passion and curiosity in computational science, which enriched my hobbies of creating and scripting 3D-printed robots.

In Dr. Sode’s lab I undertook constructing a set of potential energy surfaces for four van der Waals rare-gas CO₂ complexes (Rg-CO₂; Rg = He, Ne, Kr, Xe). We used permutationally invariant polynomials to construct a potential energy function for each complex and fit these against a set of 44,000 Rg-CO₂ configuration potentials calculated at the CCSD[t] level of theory using Tikhonov regularization. A paper on this is in preparation to be submitted to the Journal of Physical Chemistry A in early 2024.

For more information on my research, please visit my research page