Summary
Fabiola Aguirre is a first generation, fourth-year student pursuing bachelor’s in Chemistry with a professional emphasis. She is taking classes in chemistry and math. Her primary instructor is Dr. Ying Yang, who focuses on synthetic polymer, and materials with an emphasis on sustainability, along with graduate student mentor Julian Highmoore. For the time being, Fabiola is working on her senior thesis, researching chemically recyclable crosslinked polymers. Currently, plastics have become a pressing issue in the environment, such as through the acidification of the world’s oceans, forever chemicals in water, among many other environmental problems. As a result, the issue of post-consumer management of plastics and overall sustainability are of extreme importance. With the research Fabiola is involved with, recyclable polymers will be able to depolymerize and re-polymerize, bypassing many known issues with polymer recycling and ultimately resulting in a closed-circuit plastic economy. Fabiola is involved in all parts of the lab including but not limited to synthesis, project design and characterization, analysis of mechanical properties and more. She has attended the NSF GRFP workshop in order to learn more about applying for funding for graduate school. Fabiola did an internship at Michigan State University under Dr. Melanie Chiu and worked closely with graduate student Parker Bennet. While there, she worked on small molecule synthesis and photochromic polymers while studying their dispersities and molecular weight for semiconductors.