Faces of CCE
Lucas Crown
Lucas joined CCE in August 2024 as an Administrative Assistant. He grew up in New England and made his way to Los Angeles to study Cinema at USC. After college, a part-time job to pay the rent turned into a career designing and developing payment products for the Internet. This eventually led to being Director of Product Management at a successful start-up company in Silicon Valley. Lucas has always been an avid science reader, including many books by Caltech Professors. As an administrative assistant, he gets to spend his days around brilliant, innovative minds seeking answers to the most difficult scientific questions.
Sujit Datta
Sujit Datta is the Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biophysics in CCE, where he moved in 2024 from Princeton University. Sujit started his academic career at the University of Pennsylvania and received a BA in Mathematics and Physics and an MS in Physics in 2008. He then moved to Harvard, and obtained his PhD in Physics in 2013. His postdoctoral training was in Chemical Engineering at Caltech, where he studied the biophysics of the gut with Rustem Ismagilov. He then started his faculty career at Princeton in 2017.
Sujit’s research is in the study of transport processes, which aims to predict and control the movement of physical entities such as molecules and cells. In particular, motivated by challenges in biotechnology, energy, medicine, and sustainability, his research group studies the transport of soft (“squishy”) and living systems—e.g., “complex” fluids, gels, and multicellular bacterial populations—through complex environments ranging from soils, sediments, and porous rocks to gels and tissues in our bodies.
Sujit grew up in Toronto, but lost most of his Canadian accent by living in Abu Dhabi, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and New Jersey. In his free time, Sujit likes to play with his five-year-old daughter, cook, eat, run, and reminisce about his past life as a competitive kickboxer.
Kristen E. Gardner
Kristen Gardner is a new postdoc in the Reisman lab. She earned her B.S. in Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before moving out west to University of California, Berkeley where she earned her PhD. During her PhD with Prof. Richmond Sarpong, she studied the diversification of a versatile heterocycle, 2-pyrone, for novel methodology development and the total synthesis of cephalotane-type diterpenoids.
Kristen recently joined the Reisman lab with a strong interest of developing new reductive Sm- and Ni- catalyzed reactions. Outside of her research, Kristen hopes to continue her work on helping other underrepresented students in chemistry find their footing and be aware of all opportunities as they navigate their independent academic careers.
Yelim Yi
Yelim is a postdoc in the Shan Lab. She grew up in Dongducheon, South Korea. Yelim obtained her B.S. in Chemistry from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), followed by her Ph.D. in Chemical Biology and Bioinorganic Chemistry from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
During her graduate studies, her research was centered on identifying the interactive network involving amyloidogenic peptides or proteins, biomolecules, and metal ions in neurodegeneration.
Yelim has recently joined the Shan Lab with a strong interest in deciphering the molecular basis of cellular events occurred by chaperones’ activities towards proteome.
In a future issue: Sandeep Sharma, Professor of Chemistry; Isaac Fianu, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry; Johannes Morstein, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Kara Fong; Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering
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