Andy is a native of Orange County, CA and obtained his B.S. in chemistry from UC Irvine in 2010 and Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2016. While at UCI, he explored redox-active organometallic complexes of early transition metals in Alan Heyduk’s group. At UC Berkeley, with T. Don Tilley, he worked on the chemistry of artificial photosynthesis, where he developed cobalt metalloclusters and studied their mechanism of catalytic oxygen-evolution. In a postdoctoral fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Ron Zuckermann, he gained expertise in peptide and peptidomimetic chemistry. Since 2020, his research group at the University of Illinois Chicago integrates peptide design with inorganic chemistry to tackle challenges involving metalloenzyme mimicry, energy-conversion catalysis, and materials design.