Eilaf Egap (née Ahmed) is an assistant professor of Materials Science at Rice University. She works on imaging techniques and biomaterials for early diagnostics and drug delivery. She was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology MLK Visiting Scholar in 2011.

Early life and education

Egap was born in Athens, Ohio, and went to school in New York City.^[1] She started her academic career at Stony Brook University as a philosophy major, but was inspired by her chemistry professor and switched to chemistry.^[1] She graduated from Stony Brook University in 2005.^[2] She completed her postgraduate studies in 2011 at the University of Washington under the supervision of Samson Jenekhe.^[3] Her doctoral work focused on the design and synthesis of organic macromolecules. She examined the structure–property relationships of these macromolecules in next generation electronic devices, including organic field-effect transistors, organic photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes. She investigated how charge carriers and excitons are confined in 0D and 1D nanostructures.^[4] This included benzobisthiazole-thiophene copolymers, which can be used for OFETs and OPVs.^[5] She worked on oligothiophene-functionalised naphthalene dimide nanowires that can form in solution.^[6][7] Whilst at the University of Washington she developed electron-transport materials for efficient blue phosphorescent OLEDs, using FIrpic and oligoquinolines.^[8]

Ahmed joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow with Timothy M. Swager.^[9][10] She was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar between 2011 and 2013.^[11][12] She developed a platform that used polymer nanoparticles for in vivo imaging.^[4] She won the Gordon Research Conferences Carl Storm Award in 2013 and a graduate award at the MIT Polymer Day in 2014.^[11]

Research

Egap joined Emory University in 2014. At the same time she held a joint position at Georgia Institute of Technology at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. She has explored the polymer chemical properties that can impact their ability to self-assemble.

She won the 2015 Thieme Publishers Chemistry Award.^[13] In 2016 she was named by Chemical & Engineering News as a Must See at the American Chemical Society national meeting.^[14] She presented her work on ways to align one-dimensional polymer nanowires.^[15] She was awarded a National Science Foundation award to explore open-shell conjugated oligomers and polymers.^[16][17] The polymer backbone units incorporate polythiophene and quinoidal units.^[16] She explored how ultra-fast transient absorption spectroscopy and scanning probe microscopy can be used to characterise the systems.^[16] She is interested in spin-polarisation and spin-exchange.^[16] She ran an eight-week summer program for students from historically black colleges and universities to take part in research.^[16]

Egap was one of the 2017 Emerging Investigators in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C.^[18] She demonstrated how near-infrared emitting triblock copolymers could be incorporated into an oligo(ethylene glycol) core for targeted drug delivery.^[19] The core-shell nanoparticles can be used to target folate receptor cancer cells.^[19] In 2017 she moved to Rice University.^[20] She explored how to synthesise functional polymers using photosensitive quantum dots as a catalyst.^[21][22] The technique is known as photo-controlled atom transfer radical polymerization and could replace the current catalysts used to synthesise block copolymers and methacrylates.^[23][21] In 2018 she was named as one of the American Chemical Society Polymer Materials Science Engineering (PMSE) Young Investigator award prize.^[24]

References