Hannah Uhl

Hannah Uhl is a graduate student in chemical engineering designing intrinsically disordered proteins to determine physical interactions driving selective coacervation of biomolecules. Liquid-liquid phase separation in cells leads to formation of coacervates that impact important cell processes, such as transcriptional regulation and cell signaling, yet the molecular interactions governing this phase behavior remain poorly understood. She uses contrast variation small angle neutron scattering on protein-biomolecule solutions to measure interactions between species. Hannah deconvolutes scattering patterns into partial structure factors using MATLAB, then applies the S0 method to compute activity coefficients as model-independent thermodynamic variables. Her MATLAB workflow performs matrix operations including construction and inversion of contrast-dependent matrices across the full scattering vector range to ensure numerical stability. As a MathWorks Fellow, Hannah will implement this framework to extract thermodynamic parameters from experimental data. Her work could establish a fundamental understanding of protein interactions needed for rational design of biomolecules with targeted phase separation for industrial applications.