Maggie pursued a master's in bioengineering and investigated how coacervate materials interact with cells in collaboration with Prof. Gonzalez-Fernandez.

Prior research focused on investigating the phase space of heteroprotein coacervates. Instead of utilizing synthetic polymers or peptides, she used only proteins to make polyelectrolyte complexes. Her work charted out the formulation space where we see complexation or a single phase, and whether the complexes formed are coacervates or precipitates.

Alli is a chemical engineer class of 2026 who worked on airbrushing complex coacervates for use as a pH indicator for applications such as wound healing.

Kavya joined us through the Rossin Research Scholars program and worked under Kimia to elucidate how chirality affects phase separation and cargo stability. Specifically, her research explored how polymer length dictates the phase space of poly-L-lysine and nucleic acid complexes.

Logan worked with Sarah and Kimia to investigate the effect of salts on peptide/peptoid complexes.

Matt is a chemical and biomolecular engineering undergraduate who worked with Alli to form fibers via an airbrush system with complex coacervates. He continued this research in a senior thesis to understand how temperature may affect the resulting fiber morphology.  Matt is now pursuing a PhD at the University of Utah.

Sydney was part of the IDEAS program, concentrating in chemical engineering and political science. She worked with a model coacervate system to generate phase diagrams utilizing small sample volumes. Her work allows us to describe the phase behavior of systems where large sample volumes are difficult to make, allowing us to investigate how binodal curves and salt resistance shift as various system parameters, such as chain length and composition, are changed.