Marya Lieberman, PhD

Marya Lieberman is a professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at Notre Dame.

Marya is interested in the constraints of carrying out chemical analysis in low resource settings. Research areas include rescue of ancient color tests from the pre-spectrometry literature, development of new chemical color tests, and incorporation of enzymatic reactions, aptamers, and whole-cell biosensors on paper platforms, as well as automation of sampling, image analysis, and metadata collection.

Her group designs, produces, and field tests paper analytical devices (PADs). PADs are in use in Kenya, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tanzania, Malawi, and Bangladesh to detect poor quality pharmaceuticals that kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. In the US, we are testing PADs as a way to track environmental contaminents, ground level air pollution, and supply chains for illicit drugs.

Marya earned her BS in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She studied de novo protein design with Tomikazu Sasaki at the University of Washington in Seattle, earning her PhD in 1994. Afterwards, she received an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship for work in surface chemistry at the California Institute of Technology with Nathan Lewis.