Thomas Tao
Thomas has been a contributor to Research Girl since October of 2024. His current scholarly research, and content contributions to Research Girl, focus on physical organic chemistry.
About
Biographical Sketch:
Thomas is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics (Kousteni lab) and the Department of Chemistry (Cornish lab) at Columbia University. Previously, Thomas graduated summa cum laude with honors in 2024 from Skidmore College. He originally was trained as a physical organic chemist at Prof. Aneta Turlik's lab at Skidmore College, where he completed my two main projects in physical organic chemistry of intramolecular tandem IDEEAs en route to the synthesis of vindoline and total synthesis of Myrtaceae terpenoids. At Skidmore, advised by Prof. Jason Breves, he applied omics to discover a novel osmoregulatory protein and characterized its physiological role and endocrinological regulatory mechanisms.
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At Columbia University, co-advised by Prof. Virginia W. Cornish and Stavroula Kousteni, Thomas is interested in 1) discovering and engineering novel chemistry to translate into novel disease therapeutics and 2) characterizing the systematic, microenvironment-based, and cellular ontological metabolism to discover novel therapeutic targets and asymmetric biocatalysts.