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, then applies the S0 method to compute activity coefficients as model-independent thermodynamic variables. The 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. These insights could inform the rational design of biomolecules with targeted phase separation properties for industrial applications.