Katherine A. Mirica PhD

Katherine was born and raised in Ukraine and moved with her family to the state of Rhode Island during her freshman year in high school. She attended Boston College, where she developed a passion for Materials Chemistry, working in the laboratory of Lawrence T. Scott. She graduated with high honors in 2004, and later that year moved across the river to pursue graduate studies at Harvard University. In 2011, Katherine earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Harvard University under the guidance of George M. Whitesides. Her doctoral dissertation focused on the development and characterization of a simple and portable method that used magnetic levitation for density-based chemical analysis. She also contributed to several other research efforts in the areas of paper-based diagnostics and protein biophysics. Katherine then joined the laboratory of Timothy M. Swager at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an NIH postdoctoral fellow to pursue the development of portable electronic carbon-based chemical sensors for the detection of hazardous gases and vapors. At MIT, she developed a solvent-free approach, operationally analogous to drawing with pencil on paper, for the fabrication of sensitive and selective sensors from carbon nanomaterials. Katherine began her independent scientific career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Dartmouth College in July 2015 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2021. Her research interests span the topics of self-assembly, design, and synthesis of multifunctional framework materials, electroanalysis, energy, catalysis, and adhesion science.