User Portlet

Alan Aguirre-Soto is a postdoctoral Research Associate at MIT focusing on light-activated polymerization reactions in the presence of proteins for low-cost medical diagnostics devices. Alan was born in México, and his first programming language was Pascal while completing the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. He then graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering with minor in Industrial Engineering and Polymers from the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico. He also obtained a B. S. in Applied Chemistry from the University of Reutlingen in Germany as a Deutsche Akademische Austauch Dienst (DAAD) scholar. As an undergrad he won 1st place at the 2007 AIChE poster session in Materials Science, and founded the 1st Latin American AIChE Student Chapter. Later, Alan completed his M.S. and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. His doctoral thesis focused on the elucidation of the mechanisms of photocatalysis reactions to make polymer materials. To study these reactions he designed and built software and hardware for the in-situ monitoring of these chemical reactions, where handling huge quantities of spectroscopic data was a formidable challenge. During his PhD, Alan worked with undergraduate and high school students promoting science, engineering, and mathematics. Alan has been excited about Mathematica and the Wolfram Language since he heard about it during graduate school. He is thrilled about being part of the Wolfram Summer School and particularly interested in using the Wolfram language to guide the engineering of molecules that address urgent societal needs.