Angela Milo
MIT Department:
Chemistry
Faculty Mentor:
Mo Movassaghi
Research Supervisor:
Angel Garcia-Ramirez, Kathleen Downey
Undergraduate Institution:
Harvey Mudd College
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.
