Ludmilla Aristilde
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Cornell University
Ludmilla Aristilde | |
|---|---|
| Born | |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley Cornell University |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Northwestern University Cornell University |
| Thesis | A mechanistic investigation of the environmental chemodynamics of fluoroquinolone antibiotics (2008) |
Ludmilla Aristilde is an American engineer who is a professor at Northwestern University. Her research considers environmental biochemistry and bioengineering. She was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Bessel Research Award.
Aristilde grew up in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti.[1][2][3] She became interested in environmental science because of the environmental devastation she witnessed as a child, including deforestation and water pollution.[4] Dirty water drove an epidemic of cholera; deforestation caused flooding and erosion.[2] She studied the science of earth systems at Cornell University, where, as a keen artist, she also completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts.[4] She moved to University of California, Berkeley for graduate studies, where she majored in environmental engineering and became interested in toxicology.[citation needed] She stayed in Berkeley for her doctoral research, investigating the chemodynamics of fluoroquinolone antibiotics with Garrison Sposito.[5] Fluoroquinolone antibiotics have a broad spectrum of antibacterial activity, but impact biogeochemical processes through soil bacteria. As the antibiotics strongly bond to soils, they impact their degradation and bioavailability.[5] Aristilde combined experimental and theoretical approaches to understand the environmental impacts of ciprofloxacin.[5] She was a postdoctoral researcher in Grenoble, where she held a Fulbright Program scholarship and developed spectroscopic techniques to understand interactions between organic materials and minerals.[4] She completed a National Science Foundation postdoc at Princeton University, where she learned about metabolomics and molecular biology, and joined Cornell University in 2018.[4]
