- Chemical Engineering, Statistics Minor
- Dr. Samantha Meenach's Lab
Biography
Camila Cersosimo is a senior majoring in Chemical Engineering with a statistics minor. She is passionate about biomaterials and drug delivery research. Camila’s love for math and statistics have led her on a path of interdisciplinary exploration and she plans to combine these interests while pursuing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering.
As a nontraditional student, her educational journey has been the most rewarding experience of her life and she is so excited to continue to develop and grow as a scientist! When she is not studying, Camila loves listening to music and playing the piano. Having grown up in the Dominican Republic, she considers the beach her happy place and tries to go as often as she can, if it’s not too cold!
Research
During the summer of 2022, Camila participated in the Summer Research Opportunities at Harvard (SROH) program where she worked in the laboratory of Dr. Vinothan Manoharan. Through SROH, Camila studied the underlying mechanisms behind virus disassembly. In essence, they aimed to understand what causes viral capsids to disassemble (or break apart), given that viruses have evolved to perform this task in nature. The research project exposed virus-like particles encapsulating short oligonucleotides to a variety of buffer conditions to understand what causes them to release an encapsulated cargo. Camila received a 2023 Barry Goldwater Scholarship in which she wrote about her research experience and findings in this project.
For the 2022-2023 academic year, Camila returned to URI and began an undergraduate research project on spray-dried flavonoid-loaded nanocomposite microparticles for potential applications in pulmonary drug delivery with her MARC mentor, Dr. Samantha Meenach. During the summer of 2023, Camila’s MARC summer research experience (SRE) will be conducted in the laboratory of Dr. Joanna Aizenberg at Harvard University through the Amgen Scholars Program. She will work on a project involving the development of inverse opals as biosensors.