TCNJ

19 SPRING 2025 19 SPRING 2025 " My MOM used tO call Me MadaM curie." As a preschooler, Iknoor Grewal would stand at her kitchen playset and pretend to mix potions. "I was like, 'This is a strength potion. This is a beauty potion,'" she says. A love of chemistry catalyzed from there. At TCNJ, she landed in Professor Joseph Baker's computational chemistry lab researching the E. coli bacteria system (you know, that pesky bacteria that's known to contaminate raw veggies and make us sick). "We look at these systems, and we use the college's supercomputer to run simulations of them," she says. "The specific things that I simulate are the bacteria's adhesive arms and legs, called pili." Things go south in the human body when these pili grab on to epithelial cells and allow for the bacteria to hang on and multiply. Grewal is working to disrupt that process. She's been simulating what would happen if a certain therapeutic protein that naturally occurs in human saliva was attached onto the pili. "If we can break the pili, then they can't hang on," she says. "The bacteria would get washed out of the body, so the infection would no longer persist to the same extent," she says. For Grewal, chemistry is like a game — if you crack one code, you could potentially crack others. She sees herself working to develop drugs either at a national lab or in the pharmaceutical industry, and she's eager to continue researching bacteria as she pursues her PhD in chemistry at the University of Virginia this fall. "I definitely want to fight more bad guys," she says. "When we win, humanity wins." Grewal holds a 3D-printed E. coli model.

• Cover