Principal investigator
Nairiti J. Sinha, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering,
Pennsylvania State University (Started Fall 2023)
Education
B. Tech. Polymer Engineering and Technology, Institute of Chemical Technology, Mumbai, India. (2010 – 2014)
Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering, University of Delaware, Delaware, U.S.A & NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR), NIST, Gaithersburg, Maryland, U.S.A. (2014 -2020)
Postdoctoral Researcher, Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, U.S.A. (2020 – 2023)
Biosketch
Dr. Nairiti Sinha completed her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Delaware in 2020 under the advisement of Prof. Darrin Pochan. As a graduate student, she was also affiliated with NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Maryland. She pursued postdoctoral research at the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California Santa Barbara under the advisement of Prof. Matthew Helgeson and Prof. Craig Hawker. Dr. Sinha is an incoming tenure-track assistant professor at Penn State University in the department of Materials Science and Engineering.
As part of her doctoral thesis, Dr. Sinha investigated the sequence design, solution behavior, dynamics and self-assembly of synthetic peptides called bundlemers. She received the ACS POLY/PMSE Excellence in Graduate Research Award in 2020 and was awarded the Wiley Prize for best oral submission that year. Dr. Sinha has also delivered multiple invited conference talks and seminars on her Ph.D. work that has culminated in over five first author publications in high impact journals and many co-author publications. Her postdoctoral work investigated molecular design-driven structure-property relationships in various materials such as coacervates, hydrogels and biological nanocomposites. Dr. Sinha’s manuscript that elucidates the balance of interactions in coacervating mixtures of homochiral peptides was selected for the highly competitive ACS Editor’s Choice papers in July 2023. Dr. Sinha was also selected for the Rising Stars in Soft and Biological Matter Symposium 2022 among 25 other international awardees for her postdoctoral research.
Graduate Students
Brendan Karafinski
Bachelor’s in Materials Science and Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
Interested in joining our group? We are actively hiring students and postdocs! Email the PI at sinha@psu.edu