I was born and raised in the beautiful city of Montréal, Québec, and completed my undergraduate studies at Concordia University with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Multidisciplinary Studies in Science. Although I was originally inspired to become a physicist, I was drawn to chemistry because of its multidisciplinary nature and the combination of both fundamental and applied science. My introduction to experimental research was in the lab of Prof. Xavier Ottenwaelder, synthesizing organic ligands for copper-based oxidative catalysts. In 2014, I graduated top of my class, and began my doctoral studies in physical chemistry at Princeton University. Under the guidance of Prof. Greg Scholes, I was introduced to the world of nonlinear optics, ultrafast spectroscopy, and their application to studying energy transfer processes in optoelectronic materials and photosynthetic proteins.

I carried this knowledge with me when I transferred my doctoral studies to the University of Toronto in 2016 where I joined the groups of Prof. Ted Sargent and Prof. Shana Kelley. My doctoral work explored the ligand chemistry and ultrafast photophysics of solution-processed optoelectronic materials - semiconductor quantum dots and metal halide perovskites. Some major achievements from my doctoral  studies were to show, for the first time, that interwell exciton transfer occurs on timescales of 100s of femtoseconds, whereas charge transfer occurs on slower timescales of 100s of picoseconds. These observations further led to the discovery that 2D perovskites exhibit an intrinsic type-I band alignment, but their valence band maxima can be shifted into a type-II alignment, which facilitates interwell hole transfer. This result reconciled conflicting hypotheses throughout the field, where both types of band alignment had been separately observed. I obtained my Ph.D. in 2019 and was awarded the Governor General's Gold Medal.