Nicholas Ernst

PhD, Tulane University, 2021; Department of Chemistry and Physics, Purdue University Northwest

Nicholas Ernst

PhD, Tulane University, 2021; Department of Chemistry and Physics, Purdue University Northwest

Nick was born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago IL. He has pursued various jobs including manual labor, bartending, loading dock manager at UPS, custodian, and technology specialist for a K-8 school district before completing his BS degree in chemistry at Purdue University 2016. Nick joined the Gibb group in November of 2016. In the fall of 2019, he undertook an internship at the USDA ARS in New Orleans working under Dr. Sunghyun Nam developing a practical SERS method for the assessment of wash durability of textiles containing silver nanoparticles.

Nick’s research interests include the thermodynamics of protein folding and aggregation, probing ligand binding in host guest systems as part of the ongoing SAMPL exercises, and exploring cononsolvency effects on supramolecular binding events. He is also interested in raw materials chemistry and chemistry communication as hobbies.

In June 2021 Nick defended his dissertation entitled “Solubility tuning using the hydrophobic effect and its derivatives” and graduate with a PhD the following August. As of Fall 2021 he is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Indiana.