Biography

I live in a small town in northern New Jersey known as Tenafly. With not much to do besides visit what is considered our downtown area consisting of a Stop&Shop and a small movie theater that plays no more than three movies at a time, I’m pretty grateful to attend the Horace Mann School in Riverdale, New York. Attending HM as one of the few students residing in New Jersey, I’ve definitely grown to love both the suburban and cosmopolitan lifestyles I’ve been exposed to. Living in two places at once has opened me up to a range of opportunities, the most important of which allowed me to realize my passion for chemistry and physics.

Unlike many scientists, I wasn’t always sure of a career in research, even the sciences for that matter. Entering high school, foreign relations and economics were two of my favorite things to read, learn, and talk about. It wasn’t until the middle of my freshman year did I realize my passion for problem solving and logical thinking. In September of my ninth grade, I signed up for the Test of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics, and Science (TEAMS) competition. I had always been good at science, and high school was a new beginning, so I decided to try something different. Signing up was definitely one of the best decisions of my high school career. We began practice in late November, with weekly meetings of solving problem sets, researching annual themes, and discussing our topics. The other clubs I was involved in quickly took the back seat as I became more and more engrossed in the TEAMS problems sets and analytical research the competition required.

Sophomore year came along, and I took my first course in chemistry. I absolutely loved it. I loved everything from weekly lab periods to classroom sessions where we would learn about quantum theory and atomic structure. By the end of my sophomore year I was accepted into the Research Mentorship Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Excited to finally gain some hands-on experience in my newfound field of interest, I was placed in the fluid mechanics lab, where I worked under the guidance a graduate student pursuing his PhD in chemical engineering to examine the behavior of non-Newtonian fluids under different types of stress. Unaware of how much physics was involved and never having taken a physics class in my life, I spent those six weeks with my days in the lab and nights buried in physics textbooks catching up on what I had not yet learned. Eventually those reading periods turned into times of exploration where I would venture out to the libraries of UCSB to read more on the theories of spurt, a physical phenomenon everybody in our lab was interested in discovering the causes of. By the end of my time at Santa Barbara, I had written a paper on my results, which included an interesting finding on the behavior of heavily concentrated polymer solutions under sheer stress.

The end of that summer marked a transition period for me. Not only had I developed a passion for physics, but also was also truly considering a career in research. After finishing my junior year where I’ve successfully completed my first physics course (AP Physics B), won best in state for the TEAMS competition, and continued to research the behavior of polymer solutions in my free time, I’m excited to start working with Dr. Noé in the Laser Teaching Center this summer. Hopefully beyond exploring the myriad resources LTC can offer, I will be able to use my insight gained through research last year to further expand my knowledge of optics and passion for physics this year.