Seneca J. Velling

Research & Engineering Portfolio

Welcome to my Research & Engineering Portfolio. I've worked in a range of academic and industrial settings doing nanofabrication, polymer chemistry, and spectroscopy.

These days I'm two arms deep in a glove box working on prebiotic chemistry, geochemistry, and astrobio in the Origins and Habitability Lab at NASA JPL!

Some fun tidbits & my Fickian ramblings on urban planning/transit, science, and other issues

Achieving carbon aerogels!

Miralem and I realized we achieved our first carbon aerogels successfully after running N2 BET for specific surface area.

Visiting the Roman Launch

Casey and I got out to see Roman/WFIRST launch this fall! The capstone of our undergraduate JPL internship work.

Graduate Research Award

My Venus mineral weathering work (redox trajectory & isoconversional kinetics) won the ACS Geochemistry's Graduate Research award.

Successfully concluded the 2026 Astrobiology Graduate Conference

After a year's worth of planning, we held a successful AbGradCon2026 this year in Tucson, AZ, hosted by Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) and Arizona Astrobiology Center (AABC) of the University of Arizona. Over 100 participants from around the world joined us as well as keynote speakers and panelists from acadmia, industry, and NASA centers to talk about opportunities in planetary science and astrobiology.

Our conference organizing team -- Olivia Martin, Rutgers; Holly Rucker, UW Madison; Sam Nasreldine, UA; Myles Edwards, Purdue; and myself.
The conference group photo and photo of our panelists engaged with our audience.
Saturn and some of the Kronian moons, including Titan and Enceladus, captured at Mount Lemmon Observatory during the Conference's Proposal Writing Retreat.

EBSD Workshop from LPI

Electron Backscatter Diffraction (EBSD) of Planetary Materials Workshop is scheduled for May 12‒14, 2026, at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. (Figure is Apollo 14073 Sample micrograph and overlaid phase/IPF maps).

ACS Geochemistry Division Student Award

Honored to receive the ACS Geochemistry Division Student Award at the ACS Fall 2025 Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Publication: EPR spectroscopy of prebiotic organo-metallics

This work explores how EPR spectroscopy can help us understand prebiotic metal complexes and examines redox active organo-metallic coordination.

Publication: microfluidics for hydrothermal chimneys

Thrilled to announce my first first-author research paper in Langmuir 2025, 41, 29, 19111–19126. In this work, we used porous silica scaffolds as a platform for heterogeneous nucleation, capturing hydrothermal chimney analogues for ex situ study.

Guest Speaker for ASM International, LA Chapter

Invited speaker for ASM International LA Chapter's September Meeting in Marina Del Rey

Metallo-polyelectrolyte research gets published

Materials Scientists Develop Road Map for Designing Responsive Gels with Unusual Properties

Pursuing my PhD in Materials!

I got admitted to Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science to pursue my PhD in Materials!

(And my 3D print celebrating admission made Caltech news!!)

Prior project highlights and areas of interest!

Integrated Devices

Design and development of devices and models for sensing, telemetry, astronomy, and other engineering projects.

Materials & 3D Printing

Materials processing, characterization, and applications // Development of new stereolithography (SLA) resins and print processes.

Surface and Interface Science

Physics and Chemistries at phase-boundaries and interfaces

Technical skills:

Statistics and research methods
Wet chemistry, glove box work, and sputtering
Nanofabrication (lithography (including soft and e-beam), L-Edit mask design, Ion Beam, MBE, CVD/HDPCVD, plasma etching, etc)
Chemical/Wet Etching (Si/SiN/SiO)
Semiconductor fabrication and processing (DREI/REI, XeF2 Etching, etc)
Surface and particle characterization (AFM & BET)
Optical & fluorescence microscopy (including DLS and Confocal)
Electron Microscopy (SEM and STM)
X-ray characterization (XRD, XRF, W/SAXS)
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR)
Thin film characterization and metrology (goniometry, contact/laser/optical profilometry, and ellipsometer)

Note: images and figures were created or collected by the author, and are used with permission. All information, technical and scientific figures, and images used with permission.

Google Sites

Report abuse