Speaker Bio

Appie attended the University of Missouri – Kansas City on full academic scholarship where she received her B.S. in Chemistry and B.F.A. in Dance Performance. Her undergraduate research with Prof. Xiaobo Chen focused on synthesizing nanomaterials to study photocatalytic hydrogen generation. Appie danced professionally with local Kansas City companies, and later with the San Diego Ballet. She completed her Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis in the lab of Prof. William B. Tolman, supported by the NSF-CCI Center for Sustainable Polymers, which focused on mechanistic studies of Aluminum catalysts in stereoselective ring-opening polymerizations. She joined Berkeley National Laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher in 2022 under the guidance of Prof. Rebecca Abergel and Dr. Stefan Minasian, and is pursuing research aimed at understanding the fundamental bonding behavior of the actinides.