Nairiti Sinha

Biography 

Nairiti earned her B. Tech. in Polymer Engineering and Technology from the Institute of Chemical Technology (formerly UDCT) in 2014. She earned her Ph.D. in the Darrin Pochan research lab at the UDelaware in Materials Science and Engineering in 2020. As part of her dissertation, she investigated the synthesis, design and self-assembly of computationally designed coiled coil peptide-based assemblies. As a graduate student, she was also stationed as a guest researcher at the NIST Center for Neutron Research, NIST, Gaithersburg and gained experience in biosynthesis techniques at the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR), Gaithersburg, Maryland. Nairiti was awarded the ACS POLY/PMSE Excellence in Graduate Research Award in 2020 for her PhD research. She joined the Hawker and Helgeson groups at UCSB in October 2020 to pursue postdoctoral research in coacervating peptide-based biomaterials. She intends to continue her academic career as a faculty in an R1 university. Her research interests broadly include sequence-defined peptide design, synthesis and assembly for smart biomaterial construction.

Research 

My current research efforts are centered on utilizing peptidic polymers as model systems to investigate the equilibrium and kinetic aspects of coacervation, and design peptidic polymers that assemble into sub-structured coacervating biomaterials for 3D and 4D printing of smart multifunctional biomaterials for tissue engineering applications.