Research Projects
As a research assistant and independent researcher, I have had the chance to contribute to many research projects, which I will detail below! All the topics below are areas I have research experience in, culminating from two full years of academic research at Pomona College and one full-time summer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Cyclodextrin Drug Interactions with Lipid Membranes
Ethan M. Fong, J. Sebastian D. Kinzie, Aaron Christopherson, Jacob K. Al-Hussieni, Kevin Ye, Ananya Vinay, Ryan Mooney, and Malkiat S. Johal, A Hydrophobic Goldilocks Zone for Cyclodextrin-Lipid-Membrane Interactions: Implications of Drug Hydrophobicity on Kinetics of Cholesterol Removal from Lipid Membranes, Langmuir, 2025, 41 (25), 15909–15917.
This work was culminated from my first research semester at Pomona College, where I was trained on surface-sensitive instrumentation Quartz Crystal Microbalance with Dissipation monitoring (QCM-D).
Validation of protein-protein interactions
Paco, K., Paco-Mendivil, M., Zhang, Z., Zebardast, S., Mooney, R. M., Davila, C., Yang, T., Bassi, S., Olatayinbo, P., Gonzales, V., Bin Ashraf, F., Condori Roman, I., Le Roch, K., Johal, M.S., Tolstorukov, I., Hernandez, J., Barroso da Silva, F.L., Lonardi, S., Sazinsky, M.H., Ray, A. Fine-tuned Protein Language Model Identifies Antigen-specific B Cell Receptors from Immune Repertoires., bioRxiv, 2025. (In preparation for submission.)
In this work, I led the experimental validation of antibody sequences predicted by large language models to bind the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the Sars-CoV-2 spike protein. To do this, I leveraged localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) to validate the binding of a panel of predicted antibodies to the RBD domain.
Polyelectrolyte Molecular Weight Determination
Mooney, R. M., Brainin, C., Johal, M. “An LSPR-Based Kinetic Framework for Polyelectrolyte Molecular Weight Determination: A Proof-of-Concept Study.” Analytical Chemistry (2026).
This work culminated after my first full-time Summer at Pomona College, where I gained expertise in LSPR. We developed a novel method to utilize real-time binding data between two polyelectrolytes to determine number-average molecular weight. This work compliments cononical instrumentation like Size Exclusion Chromatography which is difficult to apply to polyelectrolyte systems.
T cell Receptor-Public Neoantigen Binding
This work is the culmination of my summer research internship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. This work involved preclinical characterization of a novel T cell therapy targeting cancers with TP53 R175H mutations, one of the most common cancer-driving mutations, but also one with no approved targeted therapies. My summer internship involved detailed preclinical characterization of this new therapy, including peptide–HLA avidity testing, cytokine activation assays, flow-cytometry-based phenotyping, amino-acid mutagenesis scanning of off-targets, and live-cell functional tumor killing assays. I am continuing this work now back at Pomona College from a more biophysical perspective to understand how our identified T cell receptor mounts robust immune response.
If you are interested in this work, please feel free to check out my poster, presented at Pomona College’s Summer Research Symposium in 2025 with 500 attendees.