What colleagues say about my work

Maya is the rare student who can design a catalyst and then prove it survives a reactor. Her tandem Cu–Ag electrode work pushed our C2+ selectivity past anything the lab had achieved, and she carried the Nature Energy paper from first idea to final revision largely on her own.

On her committee I've watched Maya defend results under genuinely tough questioning and improve them every time. Her operando Raman mapping of cation effects is the kind of careful interfacial work that changes how the field thinks, not just another data point.

We partnered with Maya on durability testing of her membrane-electrode assemblies, and she understood our industrial constraints better than most academics we work with. Her MEAs held performance at current densities where ours typically flooded — that's a result our engineers still cite.

Maya gave one of the standout invited talks at our session on CO₂ utilization. She moved from catalyst surface to techno-economic floor without losing the room — a clarity of argument that's unusual at any career stage, let alone for a PhD candidate.

I co-authored our Joule paper on flooding-resistant MEAs with Maya. She is meticulous about the data and generous with credit — she taught me how to run reproducible durability tests, and the protocol we built together is now standard in the lab.

Maya mentored me as an REU student and changed the trajectory of my career. She trusted me with real experiments on cation effects, edited my first abstract line by line, and made sure my name went on the work. I'm in a PhD program today because of how she taught me to think.