Eilaf Egap

Eilaf Egap (née Ahmed) is an adjunct assistant professor of Materials Science at Rice University. She works on imaging techniques and biomaterials for early diagnostics and drug delivery. She was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology MLK Visiting Scholar in 2011.

Early life and education Egap was born in Athens, Ohio, and went to school in New York City. She started her academic career at Stony Brook University as a philosophy major, but was inspired by her chemistry professor and switched to chemistry. She completed her postgraduate studies in 2011 at the University of Washington under the supervision of Samson Jenekhe. Her doctoral work focused on the design and synthesis of organic macromolecules. She examined the structure–property relationships of these macromolecules in next generation electronic devices, including organic field-effect transistors, organic photovoltaics and light-emitting diodes. She investigated how charge carriers and excitons are confined in 0D and 1D nanostructures. This included benzobisthiazole-thiophene copolymers, which can be used for OFETs and OPVs. She worked on oligothiophene-functionalised naphthalene diimide nanowires that can form in solution. Whilst at the University of Washington she developed electron-transport materials for efficient blue phosphorescent OLEDs, using FIrpic and oligoquinolines.

Ahmed joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow with Timothy M. Swager. She was a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar between 2011 and 2013. She developed a platform that used polymer nanoparticles for in vivo imaging. In 2016 she was named by Chemical & Engineering News as a Must See at the American Chemical Society national meeting. She presented her work on ways to align one-dimensional polymer nanowires. She was awarded a National Science Foundation award to explore open-shell conjugated oligomers and polymers. The polymer backbone units incorporate polythiophene and quinoidal units. She demonstrated how near-infrared emitting triblock copolymers could be incorporated into an oligo(ethylene glycol) core for targeted drug delivery. The core-shell nanoparticles can be used to target folate receptor cancer cells. She explored how to synthesise functional polymers using photosensitive quantum dots as a catalyst. The technique is known as photo-controlled atom transfer radical polymerization and could replace the current catalysts used to synthesise block copolymers and methacrylates.