Jordan Villa
Graduate student studying RNA regulators in extremophiles
Graduate student studying RNA regulators in extremophiles
Michael is currently a Research Assistant in the Freemont group working on Low Cost Viral Diagnostics as a part of an EPSRC funded project, together with collaborators at the University of Cambridge, CSIR and University of Pretoria (South Africa). Apart from this project he also regularly collaborates and mentors students from the Royal College of Art and organises workshops for the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) XY Module.
I am a graduate student in the Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology program at Rice University. I am in the Chappell Lab and build RNA regulators.
Corey Hudson is a computational biologist at Sandia National Laboratories located in Livermore, California. He has a Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Missouri. Corey has been at Sandia since 2013 and leads teams in cybersecurity, machine learning, synthetic biology and genomics. His principal work is modeling and simulating cybersecurity risks in realistic and large-scale genomic systems and highly automated synthetic biology facilities.
I am a multidisciplinary scientist interested in applying data science and physics to create biological solutions that positively impact the world. My professional career has brought me through the fields of microbiology, plant synthetic biology, and now bioengineering algae and cyanobacteria towards the goal of biofuels production. I am currently pursuing a biomedical engineering M.E. at Colorado State University.
Dan Anderson is a graduate student in Christopher Voigt’s group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prior to being at MIT, he attended the University of California, Berkeley where he conducted research in Professor Adam Arkin’s group focused on control theory applications in synthetic genetic circuits. At UC Berkeley he showed his dedication of educational outreach by helping to develop curriculum for the Principles of Synthetic Biology edX course and acting as as volunteer tutor for the biophysical chemistry course. In 2016, he graduated with highest distinction from UC Berkeley with a BA in Molecular and Cell Biology and entered MIT’s Biological Engineering PhD program as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow. At MIT, his primary research project in the Voigt group focuses on devising new analog signal processing mechanisms with dCas9-based genetic circuitry. Dan also holds positions in several student-run organizations at MIT including the MIT Outing Club (MITOC), the Synthetic Biology Center Student Leadership Board (SBC SLB), the EBRC Student and Postdoc Association (SPA). In MITOC, he serves as a trip leader, where he leads groups in outdoor activities such as climbing, hiking, and backcountry skiing. In the SBC SLB, he holds the Publicity Chair position, where he is responsible for advertising and organizing events for the SBC. His newest position with the EBRC SPA is as a Working Group Liaison in the Policy and International Engagement focus area. He is greatly interested in this opportunity to engage with the interface between academic groups and government stakeholders.
I engineer bacteria to discover new chemicals encoded in their biosynthetic gene clusters. My research has been focused on building and optimizing complex synthetic genetic clusters to produce medicinal natural products in recombinant Streptomyces species.
Matt is a graduate student in Tae Seok Moon’s lab at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on engineering probiotic bacteria for therapeutic purposes, and ensuring that these engineered bacteria are safe for potential patients and the environment. Matt received his BS in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern University. Outside of the lab, he enjoys baking bread, snowboarding, and playing with his dog, Loki.
I am currently a new postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin working on engineered plant communication. Prior to this position, I completed my graduate studies at Virginia Tech creating new tools in plants to study plant-pathogen interactions. My undergraduate degree is in plant science. I began research as a freshman conducting field surveys for plant disease, and have slowly moved from lima bean fields to the laboratories. I have enjoyed the transition, and I am enjoying working within the field of plant synthetic biology. I am passionate about plants, plant-pathogen interactions, and creating tools to both further plant research itself, as well as improve our quality of life on earth.
Arthur received a BS in Chemical Engineering from Caltech and a PhD in Bioengineering from UCSD. As a Simons-Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in the Süel Laboratory at UCSD, he developed new approaches to decipher collective mechanisms underlying bacterial biofilm organization. In particular, how a conflict between cooperation and competition is resolved through collective metabolic oscillations that increase nutrient availability for sheltered interior cells. Arthur found that these oscillations are coordinated by ion channel-mediated electrochemical signals, revealing an unexpected functional similarity between ion channels in neurons and those in microbes. These findings serve to establish a prokaryotic paradigm for electrical signaling and hint at the extent to which unicellular bacteria are capable of behaving as a proto-multicellular organism. Arthur’s laboratory is currently working to leverage these exciting findings to develop a new synthetic biology toolbox based on ion channel-mediated electrochemical communication in bacterial communities. Arthur is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Center for Synthetic Biology and holds a CASI award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Young Investigator award from the Army Research Office, and a Packard Fellowship.
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Betul Kacar (Betül Kaçar) is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona Departments of Cell Biology and Astronomy She is also an associate professor at Earth-Life Science Institute of Tokyo Institute of Technology. She received her PhD from Emory University working jointly in the Department of Chemistry and the Emory School of Medicine. She was awarded a NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2012 to bring abstractly reconstructed ancestral DNA sequences into the lab for physical, chemical and biological characterization by expressing inferred DNA sequences in modern organisms. Between 2014 and 2017 she lead an independent project funded by the John Templeton Foundation at Harvard University. In 2018, she moved her laboratory to University of Arizona where she is focusing on reconstructing key enzymatic intermediates between biological activity and global geochemical reservoirs throughout the Earth’s deep history. Betul is named a NASA Early Career Fellow in 2018.
Betul Kacar’s work has been recognized by various media outlets, such as NOVA Science, BBC Focus, New Scientist, WGBH, MIT Technology Review, SETI Institute, Astrobiology Magazine, Wired, Popular Science, PBS, iO9, CNN Turk, Quanta Magazine. She cares deeply about science education, outreach and communication, in 2012 she co-founded SAGANet,: The Online STEM Mentorship and Education Network, she serves on the Board of Advisory Committee of the MIT BioBuilder Foundation and was named “Way Cool Scientist” by the Science Club for Girls, USA in 2016.
Betul Kacar was recently awarded grants from the Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Programs as well as Harvard Origins Initiative to continue this work deeper into the past and to resurrect greater portions of the universally shared ancestral genome. She is interested in understanding life’s origins, evolution and possible existence elsewhere in t
I’m currently a scientist at Zymergen, primarily working on strain and metabolic engineering. My background is in molecular biology and evolutionary genetics. My PhD was on the impact of mutations and natural polymorphisms on gene expression in yeast, while my postdoc work was on using DNA barcoding and experimental evolution to study mutations that contribute to evolutionary adaptation. My expertise is in molecular biology, genetics, and microbiology.
Dr. O’Keefe supports the Department of Defense in the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical and Biological Defense, advising senior decision makers on science and technology, with an emphasis on synthetic biology and advanced biotechnologies. In prior positions, he supported the Department of Homeland Security and served a career as a military officer, culminating in directing the Defense Department’s Chemical and Biological Defense Science and Technology portfolio