Tessa Goté is a PhD candidate in the Armstrong Group at the Leiden Institute of Chemistry. In 2015, she pursued a joint undergraduate degree in Molecular Science and Technology at the Technical University of Delft and the University of Leiden. In 2018, she completed her BSc with an internship in the Bio-organic Synthesis research group of Jeroen Codée, where she worked on the synthesis of lipooligosaccharide IV from Mycobacterium marinum. Upon completion of her undergraduate degree, Tessa was awarded an academic and athletic scholarship to pursue a business master’s degree at Duke University. After obtaining her master’s degree in 2019, Tessa continued her studies at the University of Delaware, where she followed master’s courses in advanced organic chemistry and biochemistry. Due to the Corona pandemic, she returned to the Netherlands and started her master’s degree in Chemistry at the University of Leiden in the spring of 2020. While being a full-time master student in Leiden, Tessa combined her classes with working at Janssen Vaccines as a member of the Upstream Processing lab team working on the Jcovden (Janssen) vaccine.  In 2021, she conducted her master research internship in the Molecular Physiology research group of Mario van der Stelt. Her research applied structure-based computational methods to identify allosteric binding sites, which led to design, synthesis, and biochemical testing of novel inhibitors. In the summer of 2022, she graduated with her MSc in Chemistry and started working as a PhD candidate in the group of Zach Armstrong.  She is currently working on identifying and characterizing inhibitors of carbohydrate modifying enzymes to generate a new type of anti-viral molecule.