Angela Milo
Harvey Mudd College
Faculty Advisor: Prof. Mo Movassaghi
Research Supervisors: Angel Garcia-Ramirez,
Kathleen Downey
Department: Chemistry
Biography
Angela Milo is a rising junior at Harvey Mudd College studying chemistry. She is
motivated by the challenge of developing reactions that are efficient and environmentally
responsible. At Harvey Mudd, she explored greener solvents for teaching laboratory
experiments with Professor Vosburg. In the summer of 2025, she was a Leadership Alliance
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow at Princeton University, where she worked on
photothermal methods to degrade polymers with Professor Stache. In Professor Ball’s lab at
Pomona College, she studies click reactions to access pharmaceutically relevant structures
through sulfur-fluoride exchange chemistry. This summer, in Professor Movassaghi’s lab, she
is synthesizing epidithiodiketopiperazines, a class of biologically active natural products. Her
research experience spans organic synthesis, catalysis, and green chemistry. She has been
recognized as a 2026 Astronaut Scholar and a 2024 American Chemical Society Scholar. On
campus, she is involved as a teaching assistant, tutor, and serves on the student government as
sustainability coordinator.
Synthesis of Diastereomerically Enriched Epidithiodiketopiperazines
Angela Milo1, Angel Garcia-Ramirez2 and Mohammad Movassaghi2
1Department of Chemistry, Harvey Mudd College
2Department of Chemistry, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Epidithiodiketopiperazines (ETPs) are a class of structurally complex natural products
with diverse biological activities, including potent anticancer properties. Efficient access
to stereochemically defined ETP derivatives remains important for enabling biological
evaluation. Herein, we describe progress toward the synthesis of diastereomerically enriched
C4-substituted ETPs through the development and scale-up of a concise synthetic route. The
sequence features silyl protection, lactamization, oxidation, silylation, and sulfidation. This
work has established a practical route to gram-scale quantities of ETP intermediates, with
ongoing efforts focused on completing the synthesis of the target compounds and enabling
future biological studies.
