Getting Her Ideas Out of the Lab: Roxana Piotrowska, Class of 2021, on Her New Role at Estée Lauder and What Led to It
Roxana Piotrowska (Photo courtesy of Piotrowska)
By Lida Tunesi
As
Roxana Piotrowska (Ph.D. ’21, Chemistry) can tell you, water-responsive nanomaterials and the cosmetics industry might have more in common than you would think. Having completed her dissertation research with Professors
(GC/City College; Chemistry/Chemical Engineering) at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC), Piotrowska recently began a new job with makeup, skin care, and fragrance company Estée Lauder.
“During my Ph.D. I worked with peptides, which are short chains of amino acids and building blocks of proteins,” Piotrowska said. “I used peptides to develop and study water-responsive materials that can one day hopefully help harness yet untapped evaporation energy.” In her new position, she has also been working with peptides, but to creat
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IMAGE: Rein Ulijn, founding director of the Nanoscience Initiative at the Advance Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY and Einstein Professor of Chemistry at Hunter College view more
Credit: ASRC
NEW YORK, May 5, 2021 Rein Ulijn, founding director of the Nanoscience Initiative at the Advanced Science Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY (CUNY ASRC) and Einstein Professor of Chemistry at Hunter College, has been awarded a U.S. Department of Defense s Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship the agency s most prestigious single-investigator award. The fellowship supports top-tier researchers at U.S. universities whose high-risk, high-reward work is of strategic importance to the Department of Defense. The five-year fellowship will provide $3 million to support Ulijn s work to understand how complex mixtures of molecules acquire functionality, and to repurpose this understanding to create new nanotechnology that is inspired by living systems.