About me

I'm Seneca Velling. I was raised in the Freinsheim, Bad Dürkheim in Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, before moving to central New Jersey, USA. I pursued Materials Science and Nanosciences at the University of Waterloo in Canada after high school. UWaterloo has a world-class co-operative/experiential education program. Through co-op I gained hands-on work experience applying my studies, graduating with 2 years of work experience in a variety of academic & governmental research and industry settings.

From 2020-2021 I worked on the materials team at Formlabs, where I developed silicon and thiol-ene polymer chemistries and did formulation testing for synthetic rubbers/soft materials. There I learned more polymer physics, photochemistry, and mechanics of soft materials which allowed me to excel in my M.Sc. work in the Greer Lab (Caltech). During grad school, I fell in love with mineralogy and geochemistry. Nature is full of complex, messy systems. I saw an opportunity to apply materials science skills I gained in wickedly exciting new directions -- queue my current research at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.