I am from Duluth, MN. I attended the University of Minnesota (UMN) for my undergraduate studies. I conducted high energy physics (Neutrino Oscillations) research at the University of Minnesota-Duluth (UMD) during a summer internship, and I did biological physics research at UMN involving 3D Super Resolution imaging of cells. 

I am currently studying the physical properties of chromatin using DNA origami force calipers.  DNA in is compacted in eukaryotic cells via a nucleoprotein (contains nucleic acids and proteins) complex called chromatin. The fundamental unit of chromatin is the nucleosome in which DNA is wrapped around a core of proteins called the histone octamer. There are many ways in which chromatin can be compacted including the facilitation of tighter DNA wrapping around the histone octamer and nucleosome stacking via adjacent histone octamer interactions. DNA origami nanocalipers can be used to measure forces involved in these interactions. These calipers exploit Watson-Crick base pairing of nucleotides to form specifically designed structures of double stranded DNA. The nanocaliper structure resembles a hinge. One can measure the angular distribution of an ensemble of these hinges and determine an angle dependent free energy landscape. One can then biochemically attach biomolecules to said nanocalipers (example gallery shown below) and remeasure their angular distribution in order to determine how the interactions between the nanocalipers and the biomolecule of interest affects the free energy landscape. From this, the interaction force can be gleaned. A gallery of recent images in which tetranucleosome (4 nucleosome structure) are attached to DNA origami nanocalipers is shown below. The tetranucleosomes looks like 4 white dots and the nanocalipers look like hinges.