Diondra Dilworth is an organic chemist who’s also interested in STEM education/outreach and music among other things. Born and raised in Las Vegas, NV, she moved to Cambridge, MA to attend Harvard University to study chemistry and computer science. Upon graduation, she moved to Yale University in New Haven, CT where she is an NSF GRFP-Funded PhD Candidate in Chemistry in Prof. Scott Miller’s group. Her research is part of C-GEM (Center for Genetically Encoded Materials), an NSF-funded interdisciplinary multi-institution collaboration effort tasked to answer the holy-grail question: can the ribosome, nature’s protein synthesizing machine, be re-engineered to rapidly synthesize sequence-defined polymers with chemically-, biologically-, or otherwise relevant structures, functions, and/or utilities? With the help of talented chemical biologists, structural biologists, computational biologists, and molecular biologists in universities across the United States, she hopes to use her synthetic chemistry skills to make the answer to that question “Yes!”.