On June 8 in Kane Hall, the UW Molecular Engineering and Sciences Institute (MolES) held a hooding ceremony for eight of our 2025-2026 molecular engineering PhD graduates.
Congratulations, Class of 2025–2026!
Gabrielle Balistreri Chemical Engineering, Material Science Engineering
Gabrielle’s thesis, Sustainably Sourced Bacterial Cellulose Nanoparticles for Targeted Drug Delivery , was completed in the winter of 2026.
Samantha Borje Electrical & Computer Engineering
Samantha’s thesis, High-throughput Implementation and Clique-based Design: Scaling DNA circuits from Boolean logic gates to Multi-bit Addition , will be completed in the summer of 2026.
Louis Chen Bioengineering
Louis’ thesis, Bacterial Inhibition and Urea Removal in a TiO2-Catalyzed Dialysis Regeneration Prototype , will be completed in the summer of 2026.
Gizem Gökçe-Alpkılıç Medicinal Chemistry
Gizem’s thesis, Scalable De Novo Binder Design Enabled by Integrated Computational Design and High-Throughput Screening , was completed in the winter of 2026.
Bonni Leeds School of Medicine – Physiology & Biophysics
Bonni’s thesis, Order From Chaos: How Kinetochores Organize Microtubules in the Mitotic Spindle , will be completed in the summer of 2026.
Melissa Ling Bioengineering
Melissa’s thesis, Development of Aptamer Technologies for Immune Cell Isolations , was completed in the autumn of 2025.
Rory Majule Computer Science & Engineering
Rory’s thesis, Electronically Actuated Platforms for Miniaturized Molecular and Synthetic Biology Automation , will be completed in the summer of 2026.
Janis Shin Computer Science & Engineering
Janis’ thesis, Automated Annotation and Bayesian Analysis of Metabolic Network Models , was completed in the spring of 2026.