About Me

Some background on me

I am a Ph.D. student in Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles under the advisement of Dr. Giulia Palermo. I began my Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside before transferring to UCLA alongside Dr. Palermo’s research group. I studied Biology and Biochemistry as an undergraduate at Cal State LA before earning my master’s degree in Chemistry in 2024 under the advisement of Dr. Olaseni Sode.

My long-term goal is to become a research scientist studying the molecular mechanisms that govern biological systems. I am particularly interested in molecular dynamics, enhanced sampling methods, computational biophysics, quantum chemistry, machine learning, and the growing intersection between artificial intelligence and molecular discovery. More broadly, I enjoy learning about the tools, theories, and technologies that help us better understand the natural world.

This Blog serves as my personal research journal and accountability tracker. Here I write about my experiences as a graduate student, document what I am learning, explore ideas that I find interesting, and keep track of the questions that I have yet to answer. My hope is that, over time, this blog becomes a record not only of what I learned, but also of how I learned to think as a scientist.

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.

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 and computational chemistry. Later, I continued in Dr. Sode’s lab as a master’s student from Fall 2022 to Spring 2024.

As a master’s student in Dr. Sode’s lab, I constructed a set of potential energy surfaces for four van der Waals rare-gas CO₂ complexes (Rg-CO₂; Rg = He, Ne, Kr, Xe). This project culminated in my first first-author publication in 2024: Rodriguez, L.; Natalizio, M.; Sode, O. Theoretical Insights into the Vibrational Structure of Carbon Dioxide Rare-Gas Complexes. J. Phys. Chem. A 2024, 128 (21), 4199-4205. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpca.4c00639.

Recently, I joined Dr. Giulia Palermo’s lab at UCR in Fall 2024 as a doctoral student in bioengineering where I am currently exploring the molecular mechanisms of CRISPR-Cas9 systems using a combination of quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (QM/MM) simulations, classical molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and machine learning CV generation for enhanced sampling methods.