About me

I'm Seneca Velling. I was raised in the Freinsheim, Bad Dürkheim in Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, before moving to central New Jersey, USA. I have held a life long interest in how things work and why they behave the way they do. It's a classic trope: from childhood robotics design with Lego Mindstorms (NXT/RCX microcontrollers) and recreating my bike in Autodesk Inventor, to assembling vacuum systems to try to visualize glow discharges in high school, I have pushed myself to learn new things and challenge my existing ideas about the world. I was heavily influenced by my mom's work in the chemical industry; she brought home zeolite flow-through catalysts that led to my interest with surface chemistry, crystal structure, and ChemEng themed materials challenges. I pursued Materials Science and Nanosciences at the University of Waterloo in Canada after high school. UWaterloo has a world-class co-operative/experiential education program. Through co-op I gained hands-on work experience applying my studies, graduating with 2 years of work experience in a variety of academic & governmental research and industry settings.

I credit my co-op employment with helping me find a job during COVID-19 in the materials team at Formlabs, where I developed polymer chemistries and did formulation testing for synthetic rubbers and soft materials. There I learned more polymer physics, photochemistry, and mechanics of soft materials which allowed me to excel in my M.Sc. work at Caltech in the Greer Lab. During grad school, I fell in love with mineralogy and geochemistry. Nature is full of complex, mixed material systems. I saw an opportunity to apply materials science skills I gained in wickedly exciting new directions -- queue my current research with NASA JPL.