Donald Lee
BIOGRAPHY
I am a 4th year graduate student in the chemical engineering department at Cornell. My history is scattered across the world. I went to K-3rd grade in Japan inside a US naval base, and then 3rd-12th grade in Korea inside a US army base. The learning environment was unique in that I felt both cultural influences - the American education that emphasizes innovation and fundamental concepts, and the Korean education that emphasizes rigorous repetition and application of knowledge. I did my undergraduate at UC Berkeley starting from 2005, and obtained my B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2009. Right before graduating from college, the swine flu pandemic was causing a global panic and I became curious about viruses in general. As I was searching for graduate programs to pursue, I came across Susan Daniel, who is working on characterizing influenza entry rates. Her research suited my interest in viruses, and that is how I ended up coming to New York and joining her group.
While at Cornell, I was a part of the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Graduate Women Group outreach program and Biomedical Engineering GK-12 program. I was responsible for teaching high school students about chemistry and my own research on virus entry mechanisms. I had fun making a working bacteriophage model, quantized magnet atom model, and self-powered oil-spill cleaning device with the students. My teaching philosophy is that a new subject should be initiated through curiosity, taught through involvement, and ended with curiosity again. To me, science is a never-ending journey of questions, suspense, and answers, just like an addicting TV series.
RESEARCH
One of my projects is to improve the way we harvest algae from water. Algae are a great source for biofuel, but common methods to harvest algae are very energy intensive and undermine the utility of algae as a fuel source. . Our approach is to use “flocculation,” which is the method where dispersed particles (algae) are aggregated into larger particles through the use of another molecule (virus-like particles).
The virus-like particles that we intend to use is a derived from a benign strain of influenza that we are already immune to. Influenza contains surface proteins called hemagglutinin that binds to sugar groups on cells. Hemagglutinin is also special in that at a low pH, it changes shape so that hydrophobic spikes protrude outward away from the virus towards the target host cells. These hydrophobic spikes can stick to cellular membranes and, hypothetically, cause many algae cells to clump together. We can confirm that the algae are clumping together using microscopes and machines that measure particulate sizes. Our hope is that the larger algae clumps can be scooped out of solution in an energy-efficient way.