Leah Spangler, Ph.D.

Leah obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Lehigh University where she studied the single enzyme biomineralization of semiconductor quantum dots for biomedical and energy applications. Leah then continued her research career as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Prof. Gregory Scholes’ lab at Princeton University where she studied the relationship between protein structure and optical properties of photosynthetic proteins, amyloid fibers, and de novo proteins. Leah’s current research interests include engineering de novo proteins with enzymatic activity for application in scalable biomaterial synthesis, and using time resolved spectroscopy to elucidate the photophysical mechanisms of newly discovered optical properties in supramolecular protein systems.