Nick Vecchiarello

About

Nick Vecchiarello received his B.S. is Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He then worked as a late-stage purification scientist at Amgen in Cambridge Massachusetts before beginning a position as a postdoctoral researcher in the Chemistry department at MIT. Nick has joined the Chemical Engineering faculty at the University of Virginia and will begin his appointment in January 2023. Chemically modified surfaces offer exciting opportunities to develop materials with tunable molecular interactions or stimuli-responsive behaviors. These desirable surface properties are important in a range of application spaces including biomanufacturing, precision medicine, and analytical chemistry. The Vecchiarello Lab studies interfacial adsorption phenomena to design novel peptidefunctionalized materials with desired properties. Our lab works at the intersection of academia and industry to create new bioseparation materials and nanoparticle-based drug delivery vehicles to solve pressing, real-world problems. We are excited to develop strategies for discovering functionalized surfaces from large synthetic peptide libraries and to a gain fundamental understanding of adsorption processes on these surfaces using biophysical characterization techniques.