Research Details | Bouchard Lab at UCLA

01 Chemical Identity

Chemical identity inside living tissue

How can molecular identity be encoded into separable signatures deep inside tissue, where optical labels cannot reach?

Why It Matters: Many biological targets are chemically distinct but spatially hidden. The lab is interested in ways to distinguish target identity, delivery, gas exchange, and tissue physiology without relying on shallow optical contrast.
Methodologies: Hyperpolarized ¹²⁹Xe, host-guest chemistry, metal-organic frameworks, chemical-shift encoding, CEST probes, contrast-agent design, and quantitative MRI.
Student Projects: Design reporters with larger chemical-shift windows, calibrate detection limits, or connect xenon exchange to lung physiology, delivery, and target biology.
Representative Papers: Multivariate MOFs for femtomolar chemical shift-encoded MRI; hyperpolarized ¹²⁹Xe gas-exchange MRI of damaged lung function; dual-signal CEST drug-delivery monitoring.

02 Microstructure

What can the full shape and evolution of a nuclear-spin signal reveal about diffusion, confinement, and geometry?

Why It Matters: Porous, confined, and heterogeneous materials often hide the geometry that controls transport. Spectral shape and dynamics can become indirect probes of structure at length scales that are hard to access otherwise.
Methodologies: Bloch-equation modeling, distant dipolar fields, non-Markovian diffusion, stochastic transport, weak-gradient lineshape analysis, molecular dynamics, and generalized Langevin models.
Student Projects: Infer pore geometry from spectra, build bounded-domain solvers for spin dynamics, or bridge molecular dynamics to observables in confined materials.
Representative Papers: Microstructural geometry from NMR lineshape analysis; weak formulations of Bloch-DDF dynamics; non-Markovian diffusion with boundaries.

03 Immune Microenvironments

Can a local material microenvironment reshape immune response while avoiding the toxicities of systemic therapy?

Why It Matters: Immune function depends on local context: stiffness, architecture, antigen presentation, chemokines, and timing. Controlling those local cues can change T-cell activation, memory, and antitumour response.
Methodologies: Macroporous scaffolds, engineered antigen presentation, timed release of immune modulators, mechanical microenvironments, 3D cell readouts, and scaffold-response imaging.
Student Projects: Connect material architecture to T-cell memory and activation, quantify cell state in 3D gels, or measure how local cues alter tumour immunity.
Representative Papers: Peritumoural immunomodulatory scaffolds; biomaterial vaccines that amplify immunity in aged mice; T-cell activation in 3D mechanical microenvironments.

04 Chiral Spin

How does molecular handedness couple to electron transport, bond polarization, and nuclear-spin observables?

Why It Matters: Chirality can shape spin-dependent electronic behavior in ways that are still being worked out. That makes it a rich problem for chemical physics, molecular sensing, and quantum materials.
Methodologies: Effective spin Hamiltonians, density-functional calculations, J-coupling analysis, CISS theory, enantiospecific NMR measurements, and nanoscale spin probes.
Student Projects: Model chiral spin Hamiltonians, design enantiospecific measurements, or connect nanoscale spin probes to cellular and materials structure.
Representative Papers: Enantiospecificity in NMR enabled by CISS; chirality-encoded molecular wavefunctions; CISS theory with relativistic, electron-phonon, and correlation effects.

05 Quantum Spin

How can localized magnetic fields and long-lived spin states be controlled well enough to become useful physical resources?

Why It Matters: Coherence, spin order, and local field control sit at the edge between chemical physics and quantum information. Understanding them can improve sensing, control, and computation.
Methodologies: Spin dynamics, robust pulse design, singlet-state physics, nanomagnet and skyrmion control fields, qudit encodings, and noise-aware quantum algorithms.
Student Projects: Develop control pulses, simulate high-fidelity gates with cross-talk constraints, or translate chemical-physics structure into quantum information workflows.
Representative Papers: Nuclear spin singlet states in photoactive molecules; quantum control of spin qubits using nanomagnets; localized quantum-control fields from skyrmions.

06 Biological State

How can high-dimensional biological sequences and expression profiles reveal age, state, and biological similarity?

Why It Matters: Biological state is distributed across many weak signals. Transcriptomes and sequences can carry information about age, cell identity, disease, and evolutionary relationship, but the representation matters.
Methodologies: Maximum-likelihood aging clocks, Poisson count models, nonlinear gene-age fits, contrastive DNA embeddings, vector search, and physics-aware features.
Student Projects: Build sequence-alignment models, infer biological age from transcriptomes, or fuse experimental signals with simulations for better scientific decisions.
Representative Papers: Embed-Search-Align for DNA alignment; BayesAge 2.0; MicroBayesAge; multi-tissue transcriptomic aging atlas.