Eilaf Egap

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]

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]