Principal Investigator

As a new Assistant Professor at UCF, I am launching a lab dedicated to mass spectrometry proteomics. My home department is Materials Science & Engineering; I have access to and affiliations with the following: 

• Biionix Cluster: https://med.ucf.edu/biionix-cluster/team/ 

• AMPAC: https://ampac.ucf.edu/ 

• Biomedical Engineering Programs: https://mae.ucf.edu/biomedical-engineering-academic-programs/ 

• Burnett Biomedical School, College of Medicine https://med.ucf.edu/biomed/ 

• NanoScience Technology Center: https://nanoscience.ucf.edu/ 

At Northeastern University in Professor Nikolai Slavov's laboratory, I was part of the team that developed SCoPE2, or the second-generation platform of single-cell proteomics. This methodology is part of the foundation that made quantifying 1000s of proteins in single mammalian cells possible. I also led the application of SCoPE2 towards understanding when do asymmetries begin to arise in mammalian development, a fundamental question unanswerable by single-cell RNAseq. 

In pursuit of making single-cell proteomics technology more accessible, I became interested in entrepreneurship, and explored different avenues of funding, such as the NSF I-Corps program. However, my colleague, Harrison Specht, and I quickly realized that, in order for this methodology to be widely used, the technology still needed to be scaled to a level where 1000s of single cell cells could be processed in a single day, as opposed to just ~100-200. To overcome this incredible hurdle, we along with our academic advisor successfully obtained philanthropic funding to launch Parallel Squared Technology Institute (PTI) in 2023.