People

Aurelia Honerkamp-Smith, Assistant Professor

Aurelia earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in Seattle, where she investigated static and critical dynamics in lipid membranes with Sarah Keller in the Department of Chemistry. Her discoveries were recognized by the national 2010 Anna Louise Hoffman Award for Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Research. As an Oppenheimer Fellow at the University of Cambridge, she imaged the flow of fluid, lipid membranes, and cell sheets by conventional fluorescence microscopy techniques and by building a light sheet microscope in the laboratory of Ray Goldstein in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. She joined the faculty of Lehigh University in 2016, where she is a tenure-track assistant professor.

Dr. Sreeja Sasidharan, postdoctoral researcher. 

Sreeja earned her PhD in Soft Condensed Matter Physics in 2020, studying the influence of bioactive molecules on the structure and phase behavior of lipid membranes with Prof. V. A. Raghunathan at the Raman Research Institute in Bangalore, India. She was awarded an Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship at IIT Bombay, where she worked with Prof. Anirban Banerjee before joining the Honerkamp-Smith lab in 2022.  Her expertise lies in microscopy, x-ray scattering, and biochemistry and she is interested in protein-lipid interactions and mechanical contributions to lipid phase behavior. 

Gabriel Cucé, undergraduate researcher.  

Gabriel is a Lehigh Physics major. He is interested in elucidating biological phenomena through physics and data, and his goal in life is to reduce complex phenomena into tangible graphs and clear language. 

Quinn Reed, graduate student. 

Quinn is an incoming Physics graduate student (fall 2023) with a degree in mechanical engineering. He enjoys using mathematics to understand the natural world and sharing this understanding with others through teaching.  

Queen Okunnuwa, graduate student. 

Queen is a Physics graduate student who has previously done research in medical physics. She is interested in using physics knowledge and techniques to improve human health. 

Michael Ojewale, graduate student. 

Michael is a Physics graduate student who is interested in computational biophysics and medical physics. 

Lili Smits, undergraduate researcher. 

Lili is a pre-med Biology minor at Lehigh who is minoring in Physics. She is learning to use microfluidics to investigate cell responses to flow.