Tobias Giessen

Tobias Giessen is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He grew up in Germany and attended Philipps-University Marburg in Hesse to study chemistry. Winning an Erasmus Fellowship, he spent two semester at Imperial College London, UK in the group of Alan Armstrong working on the total synthesis of bioactive marine natural products before graduating with a M.Sc. His Ph.D. training was with Mohamed A. Marahiel where he focused on the discovery and biosynthesis of novel antibiotics, graduating in 2013. As a Leopoldina Fellow, he completed his postdoctoral training with Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School working on the discovery and engineering of microbial protein organelles before joining the University of Michigan in 2019. His lab is currently focused on mining microbial genomes for novel protein organelle systems involved in various cellular functions including stress resistance, detoxification and pathogenicity. By utilizing these newly discovered protein compartments and organelles he aims to design and build functional protein assemblies and integrate them with advanced genetic circuits to tackle real world problems in biomedicine, catalysis and sustainability. These efforts will result in novel living diagnostics and therapeutics, programmable nanomaterials and intracellular nanoreactors. In 2017, he was awarded the Leopoldina Prize from the German National Academy of Sciences.

Srivatsan Raman

My career path has taken me from process engineer in a petroleum refinery to a computational biologist, biochemist and now a synthetic biologist. A career in research was not what I had in mind after finishing a college, but a course in statistical mechanics changed the direction of my professional life. In the statistical mechanics course, I was awestruck that macroscopic properties of matter can be computed from molecular interactions using simple principles of probability and statistics. I decided switch fields from chemical engineering to studying biomolecules. As I started my Ph.D in biochemistry, I was inspired by the idea that the three-dimensional structure of a protein could be computed from its primary sequence. In Prof. David Baker’s laboratory (University of Washington, Seattle), I developed new computational methods to accurately predict three-dimensional structure of proteins rivaling experimental structures determined by X-ray or NMR. When I joined Prof. George Church’s group (Harvard Medical School) for postdoctoral training, my vision was to forge a new path to engineer proteins and biosynthetic pathways through the synergy of computational methods and high-throughput assays. Through biosensor-guided laboratory evolution, I engineered E. coli to overproduce a valuable natural product. Since biosensors are essential for engineering new cellular regulation, I developed a method to design new biosensors for cellular metabolites and valuable chemicals. As an independent investigator, my laboratory takes a systems and synthetic biology approach to understanding and designing biology at multiple scales: proteins, transcription regulation, metabolic pathways and whole organisms.

Melissa Takahashi

Melissa Takahashi is an Assistant Professor of Biology at California State University Northridge. She received her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University and did postdoctoral research with James J. Collins at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Takahashi lab studies the biological principles behind RNA gene regulation in bacteria. A major focus of the lab is understanding and combating the roles of RNA regulation in antibiotic resistance mechanisms. The lab uses cell-free transcription-translation platforms to investigate these mechanisms.

Entrepreneurial Scientist & Engineer Fellowship in Sustainable Foods

Purple Orange Ventures, an impact seed fund from Berlin, has just launched an Entrepreneurial Scientist & Engineer Fellowship Program in partnership with The Good Food Institute, New Harvest and Proveg to help accelerate the animal-free foodtech movement in Europe, UK, Israel, and Singapore. The program provides 120K EUR of equity-free grant funding and coaching for 12 months to support the initial research necessary for starting a truly impactful company in the space. The full program description is available at https://www.purpleorange.com/fellowship.

Kate Adamala

Kate Adamala is a biochemist building synthetic cells. Her research aims at understanding chemical principles of biology, using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development, and basic research. Kate’s research spans questions from the origin and earliest evolution of life, using synthetic biology to colonize space, to the future of biotechnology and medicine.

Alexander Green

Since starting his lab at ASU in 2015, Alexander Green’s synthetic biology research program has focused on developing RNA-based cellular control systems and exploiting cell-free systems for implementing low-cost diagnostics. He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University and his B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto. He conducted postdoctoral research with Jim Collins and Peng Yin at the Wyss Institute at Harvard. Dr. Green is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology (2017) and the recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award (2017), a DARPA Young Faculty Award (2017), and an Arizona Biomedical Research Commission New Investigator Award (2017).

Hana El-Samad

Hana El-Samad is the Kuo Family Endowed Professor and Vice Chair in the department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3). She is a 2009 Packard Fellow and recipient of many honors including the 2011 Donald. P Eckman Award and the 2012 CSB2 prize in Systems Biology. She was also named a Paul. G. Allen Distinguished Investigator in 2013, and senior investigator of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2017. Dr. El-Samad joined UCSF after obtaining a doctorate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, preceded by a Ms Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Iowa State University. Dr. El-Samad’s research group seeks to deliver foundational insights into biological feedback control, unraveling evolutionary successful principles of feedback strategies that are most appropriate for the biological substrate and achieving understanding at the right depth and granularity for forward engineering them with predictable outcomes. A major current focus of her research is to develop rationally designed, programmable, plug-and-play, cellular recognizance and repair circuits that can be broadly deployed for therapeutic (e.g. cell-based immunotherapy) and biotechnological (e.g. metabolic engineering and bioremediation) applications.

Matthew Bennett

The research in my lab spans the boundary between theoretical and experimental synthetic biology. I am particularly interested in the dynamics of gene regulation – from small-scale interactions such as transcription and translation, to the large-scale dynamics of gene networks and synthetic microbial consortia. I use an interdisciplinary approach to 1) uncover the underlying design principles governing gene networks and microbial consortia, 2) engineer novel synthetic gene circuits for practical applications, and 3) develop new mathematical tools to better describe gene networks. The ultimate goal of my research is to develop synthetic multicellular systems for biomedical and environmental applications.

Bryan Davies

Research in my laboratory explores microbial behavior important for improving human and agricultural health and performance. We study processes that enable microbes to engage with each other and their host, and develop biologics and cell-based systems to control these interactions.

Laura Segatori

Laura Segatori is an Associate Professor in Bioengineering at Rice University. She received a Laurea in Industrial Biotechnology from the University of Bologna in Italy in 2000 and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. She completed her postdoctoral work at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA and joined the faculty at Rice University in 2007 where she holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Biosciences. Her research group is highly interdisciplinary and combines principles and tools from engineering and science to decipher and manipulate cellular quality control mechanisms that underlie the development of human diseases. Current research interests are centered on reprogramming mammalian cells for the development of cell-based therapies and biomanufacturing.

Megan McClean

Megan McClean is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is also a trainer in the Microbiology Doctoral Training Program, the Biophysics Graduate Program, and the Cellular and Molecular Biology Graduate Program. She graduated from the University of California-Berkeley with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics. She then received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, where she studied signaling specificity in biological networks. She was a Lewis-Sigler Fellow at Princeton University before joining UW-Madison. Her lab engineers and utilizes synthetic biology tools to control cellular signaling to understand how dynamics modulate cellular decision-making and heterogeneity. She is a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Awardee at the Scientific Interface, a Kavli Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences and holds a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Alejandro Chavez

Alejandro (Alex) Chavez, M.D., Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Cell Biology at Columbia University. He did his M.D., Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, his residency in Clinical Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital (Harvard Medical School) and his postdoctoral studies in the labs of Dr. George M. Church and James. J. Collins at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University.

Alex’s laboratory employs Cas9-based tools for the programmable control of DNA and RNA on genome-wide scales. His lab has generated methods that endow Cas9 with single nucleotide specificity and that enable facile genome modification, activation, or repression, both alone and in any desired combination. To facilitate the adaptation of their tools, his group makes all of their published reagents available by depositing them within Addgene (to date 750+ research groups have requested their reagents), as his group believes the value of their technology is more within the research it enables than in the individual publications they produce.

Patrick Shih

Patrick M. Shih, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at UC Davis and the Director of Plant Biosystems Design at the Joint BioEnergy Institute. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in Plant Biology engineering synthetic carbon fixation pathways and studying the evolution of photosynthesis with Kris Niyogi and Cheryl Kerfeld. Patrick then did a postdoc at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developing plant synthetic biology tools for complex metabolic engineering efforts. His research is focused on utilizing synthetic biology to expand our understanding of plant metabolism. A basic understanding of the evolution of metabolism will guide novel approaches to engineering metabolic pathways for applications in agriculture, sustainability, human health, and bioenergy.

Jeff Hasty

Jeff Hasty received his Ph.D. in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1997, where he learned how to do science from his advisor Kurt Wiesenfeld. He was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University, where he learned engineering from Jim Collins in the Applied BioDynamics Lab (’98-’01). Somewhere during his postdoctoral stay with Jim he mutated from a theoretical physicist into a hybrid computational/molecular biologist. He is currently at the University of California, San Diego, where he is a Professor in the Departments of Bioengineering and Molecular Biology, Director of the BioCircuits Institute, and Co-Director of the UC San Diego qBio Ph.D Specialization Program. He is considered a pioneer and leader in synthetic biology. His early career focused on tackling central impediments to the creation of an engineering discipline. He created genetic clocks to develop the underlying equations that drive circuit design, and used them to explore the coupling of gene circuits with their host genome. Faced with the inevitable noise of intracelluar gene regulation, he was the first to demonstrate how bacterial colonies can be engineered to function deterministically through the use of intercellular synchronization. He introduced the concept of “synergistic synchronization,” whereby two synchronization mechanisms couple colonies of bacteria at centimeter length scales. He used this concept to develop inexpensive biosensors that don’t require complex optics. He has engineered periodic lysis of a bacterial colony such that population levels oscillate within a tumor microenvironment and release an encoded therapeutic. This design directly addresses the problem of systemic inflammatory response with programmed population control; since the colony is pruned after each oscillatory lysis event, the design mitigates an undesirable host response.

Domitilla Del Vecchio

Domitilla Del Vecchio received the Ph. D. degree in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and the Laurea degree in Electrical Engineering (Automation) from the University of Rome at Tor Vergata in 2005 and 1999, respectively. From 2006 to 2010, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in the Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2010, she joined Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she is currently Professor and member of the Synthetic Biology Center. She is a recipient of the 2016 Bose Research Award (MIT), the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council (2010), the NSF Career Award (2007), the American Control Conference Best Student Paper Award (2004), and the Bank of Italy Fellowship (2000).

Mikhail Shapiro

Mikhail Shapiro is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and an Investigator of the Heritage Medical Research Institute at Caltech. He received his PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and his BSc in Neuroscience from Brown, and conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Miller Fellow. The Shapiro laboratory develops biomolecular technologies allowing cells to be imaged and controlled inside the body using sound waves and magnetic fields, to enable the study of biological function in vivo and the development of cell-based diagnostic and therapeutic agents. Mikhail has been awarded the Packard Fellowship, the Pew Scholarship, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface, the DARPA Young Faculty Award and Director’s Fellowship, the Sontag Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award, the Roger Tsien Award for Excellence in Chemical Biology, the Vilcek Prize and the Technology Review TR35 award for top innovators under age 35.

Gavin Williams

Dr. Williams received his B.Sc. with First Class Honors from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth (1998) and a Ph.D. in chemical biology from the University of Leeds, England (2002). He then completed postdoctoral research at the University of Leeds with Prof. Adam Nelson (chemistry) and Prof. Alan Berry (molecular and structural biology) where he created tailored aldolase enzymes for the synthesis of sugars. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a research scientist with Prof. Jon Thorson where he engineered enzymes involved in natural product glycosylation. He has been at NC State University since 2009 where his research group uses enzyme engineering, metabolic engineering, and synthetic biology to reprogram the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, including polyketides and terpenes. Dr. Williams received the NSF Career Award in 2012, the 2014 Sigma Xi Research Award, was named a University Faculty Scholar in 2015, and is a member of the Comparative Medicine Institute at NC State. In 2019, he was named a LORD Corporation Distinguished Scholar.

Expanding access to engineering biology – STEM outreach in high schools

EBRC SPA member Kathryn Brink authors a Nature Communities blog post about increasing engagement in STEM through outreach, providing a first-person perspective about bringing engineering biology to underserved communities.

Complete lesson or course (package): Biochemical Engineering: Molecular engineering course materials

Fumiaki Hamazato

Senior Engineer, Technology Development Center, Innvation Division, Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation
Professional Engineer, Japan (Biotechnology)

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