Hello! My name is Jacob and I'm excited to share different things that I get to learn every day. I am currently a 2nd year PhD student in Chemical Engineering at MIT. This site will be used to share small things that I get to do and (hopefully) the 'big' things as well. I'll also link some references I think are interesting and fun.
I've recently made a change from polymer chemistry/physics to hybrid (mechanistic/ML) modeling of batteries. I have interest in numerical methods for solving PDEs and think we can (try to) learn (some aspects of) battery degradation physics with smart implementations of ML with symbolic regression. It is most important to me to have computationally feasible methods of doing so. We will see what can be done.
Outside of that, I enjoy climbing, reading books about math history, learning about the brain, and good burritos.
I went to UT Austin for undergrad, where I got to work with Zak Page for 4 years (with COVID affecting some of those years in-lab) on a variety of topics such as quantifying organic photocatalyst efficiencies for photopolymerization of PMMA, synthesis of functionalized norbornene monomers for crosslinked poly(norbornene)s, and measuring reaction kinetics of reversible thiol-conjugate acceptor bonding with UV-Vis spectroscopy. My mentor in lab was Adrian Rylski, who taught me a lot about experiment while we worked together.
Work done with Zidan Zhang while in Ganesan Group at UT Austin:
Ion Correlations and Partial Ionicities in Lamellar Phases of Block Copolymeric Ionic Liquids
Conductivity and Transference Numbers in Lithium Salt-Doped Block Copolymeric Ionic Liquid Electrolytes
sassj [at] mit.edu