She will be working in a National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored research project. Yet to join.
Saheli Mitra joined at Shiv Nadar University, India in 2016 as a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Sajal Kumar Ghosh (https://physics.snu.edu.in/people/faculty/sajal-ghosh). Recently, she has successfully defended her thesis. In her doctoral study, she primarily focused on understanding the effects of ionic liquids on self-assembled structures of amphiphiles. Amphiphilic molecules, such as surfactants and phospholipids, self-assemble in aqueous solutions to form various mesoscopic structures. These structures can be modified by tuning the electrostatics of the system in presence of room-temperature ionic liquids (RTILs). Understanding the structural evolutions in amphiphilic solutions is important as the structures of the aggregates decide the complex rheological behavior of the system. Further, some of the self-assembled systems such as lipid vesicles and lipid monolayers formed at air-water interface are considered as model systems for biophysical studies of the interaction of macromolecules with cellular membrane. In her thesis, commercially available RTILs and newly synthesized lipid analogue molecules have been used to investigate their effects on these self-assembled structures. Advanced synchrotron-based X-ray scattering techniques, microscopy, and Langmuir-Blodgett monolayer techniques have been employed to understand the structural details and the phase behavior induced by various RTILs. Langmuir monolayer, lipid vesicles, hierarchical lyotropic liquid crystalline (LLC) systems have been used as model systems. The obtained results have been published in several original scientific papers and presented in form of both posters and talks at few national and international conferences, e.g. EBSA Congress (Madrid, 2019).