Dr. Diaz-Allen is a natural product chemist with nearly a decade of experience teaching at the college level. She received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from Stetson University in 2016. In 2019 she received her Master’s degree in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the Ohio State University. She later received her Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, also from the Ohio State University. Her doctoral research focused on the development of a new 1D-TOCSY (total correlations spectroscopy) NMR dereplication method to detect non-bioactive, known compounds, and subsequently prioritize lichen derived extracts and fractions that were free of known compounds, for antiproliferative assessment and bioassay-guided fractionation. She has also participated in pedagogical research, developing 3D printed molecular models as visual aids for the undergraduate organic chemistry student, to facilitate comprehension of the critical role that steric hindrance plays in substitution/elimination reactions. She continues to incorporate molecular modeling and computational chemistry into her teaching philosophy, asshe believes that visual aids and models help students better understand chemical processes at the microscopic level.
