Professor Abby Knight grew up in Charlottesville, VA and received her B.S. in Chemistry with minors in Mathematics and Biology at University of North Carolina (UNC). She then received her Ph.D. in Chemical Biology at the University of California, Berkeley in the lab of Prof. Matt Francis working on the development of a platform applying combinatorial libraries for metal ligands to address problems in water and environmental remediation. Follow her graduate studies, she completed a postdoc with Prof. Craig Hawker at the University of California, Santa Barbara designing smart nanomaterials with unique architectures.

Abby returned to UNC as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Her group broadly work in designing macromolecular materials with functions inspired by biological systems. Some areas of research include creating biomimetic copolymers and peptide-polymer amphiphiles. Abby has recently received numerous awards such as 2023 Early Career Investigator Award from ACS Division of Organic Chemistry, 2024 PMSE Early Investigator Award from ACS Polymeric Materials, and 2024 Sloan Research Fellow.

For more information about Abby and her group: https://www.knightgroupunc.org/X: https://twitter.com/KnightGroupUNC and https://twitter.com/abigailsknight

Professor Loi Do was born in Vietnam and spent most of his youth in California. He obtained his B.S. in Chemistry/Biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) where he conducted undergraduate research with Prof. Seth Cohen at UCSD on supramolecular chemistry and Prof. Stephen Lippard at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on conjugated fluorescent probes for reactive nitrogen oxide species. He returned to MIT for his doctoral degree under the tutelage of Prof. Lippard working on synthetic diiron protein modeling chemistry. Then, he completed postdoctoral research with Prof. John Bercaw at the California Institute of Technology investigating the mechanism of selective ethylene trimerization by homogenous chromium catalysts.

He is now an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Houston where his group broadly study organometallic chemistry. Specifically investigating intracellular and polymerization catalysis. He is also a member of the NSF Center for Integrated Catalysis (CIC) which is to design catalysts with spatial and temporal control to make products from simple starting materials.

For more information about Prof. Do and his research group: https://sites.google.com/view/doresearch/home

X: https://twitter.com/DoResearchLab

NSF Center for Integrated Catalysis: https://cicchemistry.com/

Prof. Dan Weix was born and raised in Oak Creek, WI, just south of Milwaukee. After graduating high school he attended Columbia University in New York where he received his B.A. in Chemistry and conducted research under Prof. Thomas Katz. After completing his undergraduate studies, he moved to the west coast to undertake graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he worked with Prof. Jonathan Ellman on synthesis and application of tert-butanesulfinamide. Upon completion of his Ph.D. he began postdoctoral research with Prof. John Hartwig at Yale University, before moving with John to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. As an NIH postdoctoral fellow, he worked on enantioselective Ir-catalyzed allylation reactions. Currently, Dan is the Wayland E. Noland Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where his group broadly work on cross-electrophile couplings, understanding mechanisms, and using semiconductor quantum dots for organic catalysis. For more information about Dan and his group: https://weixgroup.chem.wisc.edu/ X: https://twitter.com/weixgroup Check out Julianna's work on semiconductor quantum dots: https://youtu.be/Yn21uh4_odc?si=RlCXL8GsAgZ--sVK