Andrea was born in Downey, California and was raised in Melrose Park, Illinois. She attended the University of Iowa where she received her B.S.E in Chemical Engineering. Throughout her freshman - junior years at the University of Iowa she worked on finding inhibitors of RAD52 repair protein in mutated BRACA1 and BRACA2 cells under the supervision of Prof. Maria Spies and mentorship of Sarah Hengel, PhD. Andrea interned at the Rogers Corporation and The Clorox Company during her sophomore and junior year summers, respectively. During her senior year she joined Prof. Tonya Peeples' lab where she identified sugars in environmental biofilms and quantified the degradation of Atrazine from pseudomonas bacteria cells. Upon graduation from the University of Iowa Andrea moved to the Bay Area to work fulltime for The Clorox Company as an R&D Scientist working on water filtration and sustainable packaging materials. She then moved back to the Chicago Suburbs to work for Honeywell UOP as a Chemical Engineer where she worked on engineering design of petrochemical and refinery processes. After working in Oil and Gas, Andrea transitioned to Pharmaceuticals as a project and validation engineer for Fresenius Kabi focusing on design and implementation of new drugs. Andrea joined the PME Fall of 2021, and currently works under the supervision of Prof. Shrayesh Patel.
Andrea's current research focuses on sustainable plastics, focusing on upcycling methods.