B.S. Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Notre Dame, 2010M.S. Polymer Science & Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2012Ph.D. Polymer Science & Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2016Post-Doc Chemistry, Texas A&M University, 2016-2018
Rachel A. Letteri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering. After obtaining a B.S. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, she completed a Ph.D. in Polymer Science & Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the direction of Professors Todd Emrick and Ryan Hayward. She then conducted postdoctoral research in the laboratory of Professor Karen Wooley in the Department of Chemistry at Texas A&M University from 2016-2018. Her research interests include materials involving functional polymers, peptides, and interfacial assemblies with applications in medicine and engineering, among others. Rachel also enjoys sharing science and engineering with others through education and outreach.
Lab overview
The Letteri lab is engineering materials that synergistically combine polymers and peptides to enable productive interactions with living systems and address central challenges in medicine and engineering. Our specific interests include understanding and exploiting stereochemistry-driven interactions and stimuli-responsive motifs to control materials properties, and using polymers to present and encapsulate peptides in ways that maximize their function.
Awards
NSF CAREER Award2022
included in the RSC Biomaterials Science Emerging Investigators Issue2021
Thomas E. Hutchinson Award (Trigon Engineering Society) for outreach to students, enthusiastic lectures, obvious love of teaching, and contributions to the Engineering School2019
Prestigious NSF Grant Funds Rachel Letteri’s Biomaterials Research Harnessing the Powerful Chemistry of Polymer Science for Health Care
Rachel Letteri’s lab is building a system for producing hydrogels that capture the complex features of human tissues to use in cell culture studies, 3D printing-based...
Mara Kuenen’s research has been getting noticed, with a recent best poster award at the American Chemical Society’s ACS Spring 2022 meeting in San Diego, and a competitive travel scholarship to attend a short course on sustainable polymers.
Grant will support the development of a next-generation MadiDrop+ for household water purification
Civil engineering professor Jim Smith co-invented the MadiDrop+ as an extremely low-cost means of providing safe drinking water for individual households.
Mara K. Kuenen, a Ph.D. student in assistant professor Rachel Letteri’s research group, has won the 2020 Chemical Engineering DuPont Student Safety Award.
Buffering effects on the solution behavior and hydrolytic degradation of poly(β-amino ester)s ABSKuenen, M. K.; Mullin, J. A.; Letteri, R. A.
Molecular Engineering of antimicrobial peptide (AMP)-polymer conjugates ABSCui, Z.; Luo, Q.; Bannon, M. S.; Gray, V. P.; Bloom, T. G.; Clore, M. F.; Hughes, M. A.; Crawford, M. A.; Letteri, R.A.
User-defined, temporal presentation of bioactive molecules on hydrogel substrates using supramolecular coiled coil complexes ABSGrewal, M. G.; Gray, V. P.; Letteri, R. A.; Highey, C.B.
Biomaterials via peptide assembly: Design, characterization, and application in tissue engineering ABSGray, V. P.; Amelung, C. D.; Duti, I. J.; Laudermilch, E. G.; Letteri, R. A.; Lampe, K. J.
Amphiphilic cross-linked liquid crystalline fluoropolymer-poly(ethylene glycol) coatings for application in challenging conditions: Comparative study between different liquid crystalline comonomers and polymer architectures. ABSZigmond, J. S.; Letteri, R. A.; Wooley, K. L. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2016, 8, 33386-33393
