Wren Hoertdoerfer

Biography

I graduated in 2024 with a B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado, Boulder. 

During my undergraduate degree I worked in the Shields lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder where I studied the influence of surface modifications on permittivity and induced charge electrophoretic (ICEP) speed of biofunctional Janus particles for motion-based biomolecule detection. This work culminated in a published manuscript in ACS Nano Letters on which I am the second author as well as many oral and poster presentations and my Chemical and Biological Engineering senior thesis. 

The summer before my senior year I was a REU intern in the Aizenberg lab at Harvard University. Here, I translated the skin system of a Waxy Monkey Tree Frog into a protective coating to prevent hydrogel dehydration. My findings, showing the preliminary success of this coating system, were presented at the NNCI REU Convocation at Montana State University and the Harvard REU symposium.