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Casey Platnich is a Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Fellow at the Cavendish Laboratory. Specialising in the use of DNA as a nanoscale construction material, Casey is currently developing methods to encode digital data into DNA with readout at the single-particle level for high density information storage.

Academic interests

Casey’s academic interests include: 

• Using DNA as a nanoscale building block
• Developing single-molecule characterisation techniques.

Degrees obtained

• BSc Hons, University of Calgary.
• PhD, McGill University.

Awards and prizes

• Herchel Smith Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (2021).
• Quebec FRQNT Étoile Louis-Berlinguet Award (2020).
• McGill M.A. Whitehead Prize for Chemistry (2019).
• NSERC Canada Graduate Scholarship – Doctoral (2017-2020).

Biography

Casey Platnich is a materials scientist from Calgary, Canada. She received her PhD in Chemistry from McGill University, where she developed single-molecule fluorescence methodologies to probe the self-assembly pathways of DNA nanomaterials. These materials can then be used as nanoscale drug delivery vehicles or in biosensing devices.

Expanding on this work, Casey is now a researcher at the Cavendish Laboratory, where she is constructing DNA ‘hard drives’ for stable, long term data storage at the molecular level in the laboratory of Prof Ulrich Keyser.

Other interests

Ice hockey, travel, reading, cooking.