Jaydee received her B.S. in chemistry from John Brown University in May 2020. Graduating during COVID was certainly a challenge however she is thrilled for the opportunity to be working with the Giere Lab group for graduate school. Her research interests fall within the sphere of environmental pollution through a chemical background. Currently, her research is focused on the characterization and identification of microplastics and investigation of their environmental and health implications.

email: jaydeee@sas.upenn.edu

ResearchGate

Carissa received her B.S. in Geology and a certificate in GIS and Remote Sensing from the University of Pittsburgh. During her time at Pitt, she worked in a paleoclimate lab where she worked with sediment cores. Now at Penn, she plans to study urban environmental issues using geochemical techniques. Specifically, she is interested in urban contaminants and their effects on the environment and public health.

email: carissar@sas.upenn.edu

Carine Medellus, an undergraduate chemistry student at the School of Arts and Sciences, previously earned her associate’s degree in Biology from Union College of New Jersey. During her summers, she conducted research on mole crabs at Rider University’s STEM Institute and explored the chemosensitivity of C. elegans at the University at Buffalo’s REU Biology internship. Excited to continue her academic journey at Penn, Carine is eager to delve into research focused on environmental chemistry.

Ruggero received his PhD from the University of Torino (Italy) conducting part of his research at the Néel Institute (CNRS – Grenoble, France) and in the Department of Mineralogy and Geochemistry of the Friedrich-Schiller University of Jena (Germany). He held postdoc positions at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (Durban, South Africa) and at the National Institute of Chemistry of Ljubljana (Slovenia), which was funded by a Rotary Global Grant. His research applies state-of-the-art scanning/transmission electron microscopy techniques for biogeochemistry, medical, and environmental mineralogy.

email: ruggero@sas.upenn.edu

ResearchGate

Hope got her B.S. in Environmental Science from Rhodes College in 2018 and focuses on environmental chemistry at Penn. She is particularly interested in the detection of inorganic contaminants, how they cycle through geologic systems, and their subsequent impacts on public health. She is working on a project that involves detecting trace metals in artisanal charcoal from Uganda to evaluate the potential for exposure to these metals when charcoal is burned as a domestic fuel source (this project mainly involves using ICP-OES to detect the metals, but also examining the mineral composition of the samples using X-ray diffraction).

Hope has been named School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Scholar at Penn. She is joining the PhD program at Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at University of Miami.

email: hopeliz@sas.upenn.edu

Jonathan Szeto is a sophomore undergraduate studying Earth science and political science in the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on aerosol pollution in indoor environments and its potential health ramifications. His current project aims to characterize fine and coarse particulate matter in Philadelphia’s public subway network.

email: jonszeto@sas.upenn.edu

Melissa got her B.S in Chemistry and minor in Physics from Emory University in 2021. As professional free diver, she decided to focus on environmental chemistry, especially on water. During her last year of undergraduate study, she had to go back to China due to COVID. But she managed to work as a researcher at East China University of Science and Technology and Shanghai Research Institute of Chemical Industry at that time. Currently, her research focus is on analyzing organic contaminants from tire-abrasion particles in road runoff to local rivers in Philadelphia.

email: qingzi@sas.upenn.edu