Isabella grew up in Toronto, Ontario, and moved to Montreal where she received a B.S. in Chemistry at McGill university in the spring of 2021. While at McGill, she worked with Dr. Scott Bohle studying organometallic iron porphyrin and carbonyl complexes, and with Dr. Vincent van Hinsberg, a professor in the Geochemistry department, studying mineral-fluid element partitioning of Gypsum. She also received the NSERC grant to work for a summer at the University of Toronto with Dr. Helen Tran designing polyelectrolytes for applications in biocompatible next-generation electronics. Here, she developed a fascination with polymer science that led her to join the Rowan group at UChicago in the fall of 2022 where she is pursuing a PhD in Chemistry.
Isabella’s research is focused on designing new polyolefin-like materials from both top-down and bottom-up approaches in order to improve the current state of plastics recycling.