Current Ph.D. student in the EECE Ph.D. program of WUSTL. Interested in synthetic biology and its application in industry. Have experience in Protein expression and CRISPR/Cas9 in Bacteria and Yeast.
I am a 1st year Bioengineering PhD student working in the lab of Dr. Arjun Raj at UPenn. I earned my Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Arkansas in May 2021. I completed my undergraduate honors thesis in the lab of Dr. Kyle P. Quinn.
I am Quanhui Ye, a third-year P.h.D student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Before this, I earned my master’s degree and then worked as a research associate in the School of Environment at Tsinghua University and Southern University of Science and Technology, respectively.
I am a native of Seattle, WA, where, growing up, I had the opportunity to explore the many beautiful environments of the Pacific Northwest. This instilled in me a respect and admiration for the environment that drives my interest in environmental engineering. As an undergraduate and post-bac at the University of Washington, I then became fascinated with microorganisms and the multitude of ways they have evolved to occupy every conceivable niche on the planet. Now at Rice University, I combine these two passions, the environment and microbiology, to develop new environmental biotechnologies.
I graduated with an MSci in Mathematics (Imperial Collage London, UK) and PhD in Microbial Systems Biology (University of Surrey, UK), and have a passion for understanding how biological systems work through mathematical and computational approached. In particular, I am passionate about learning from the designs of genetic control systems in bacteria and developing computational models to understand how they can be repurposed and engineered as synthetic genetic control circuits for various exciting biotechnological applications.
The Truong lab uses principles from synthetic and systems biology, cell fate reprogramming, epigenetics, and immunology. He and his team “rewrite” the human genome in induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to build cell therapies and regenerative medicine. The group is developing an off-the-shelf chassis iPSC that can be given to any person without immune rejection. This chassis iPSC will enable large-scale restructuring of the human genome, introduction of large and more sophisticated genetic circuits for cell programming, and the production of any somatic cell for living therapies. The group currently focuses on developing programmable off-the-shelf Dendritic Cells from human iPSCs as an immunotherapy platform.
Nicole Buan is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has broad expertise in microbial physiology, metabolism, and redox biochemistry. Dr. Buan recently co-founded the Archaea Power Hour virtual seminar series and serves as Associate Editor for Applied Environmental Microbiology and Frontiers in Microbiology (Microbial Physiology and Metabolism) journals. Dr. Buan began research as a high school student in Tucson, Arizona, where she did undergraduate thesis research on ATP-independent molecular chaperone proteins in plants under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Vierling at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow in the lab of Jorge Escalante-Semerena. There, she made key contributions to understanding protein:protein interactions involved in coenzyme B12 synthesis in Salmonella, discovered the only known iron-sulfur-cluster-containing B12 adenosyltransferase enzyme, and investigated the use of B12 mimics as chemotherapeutic “Trojan horses”. Her graduate work was recognized by the Department of Bacteriology Herman Smythe Award for Outstanding PhD research. As a NIH Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of William Metcalf at the University of Illinois, Dr. Buan received training in methanogen genetics and characterized the terminal oxidase heterodisulfide reductase enzymes. At Nebraska, Dr. Buan and her students study redox biochemistry, systems, and synthetic biology in archaea, bacteria, and plants on various projects funded by NSF, NIH, USDA, Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research, Nebraska Corn Board, and the Water Environment Reuse Foundation. Buan lab research has been awarded two patents, and Dr. Buan is the owner of two biotech startups.
Friday, January 28th, 2021
12:00pm – 6:00pm Eastern | 9:00am – 3:00pm Pacific
***NOW VIRTUAL***
Note: due to the current COVID situation, this workshop has been changed to a virtual event.
The workshop will focus on drafting our technical research roadmap to advance engineering biology tools and technologies that respond to the urgency of the climate crisis and promote long-term sustainability.
This workshop is by invitation only.
Register Here
Registration closes January 18, 2022
Agenda: Coming Soon!
Workshop Objectives
For more information about the roadmap or workshop, please contact Sifang Chen (roadmap@ebrc.org)
Dr. Xiaojun Tian received his Ph. D. degree in systems biology from Nanjing University in 2012 and spent five years as a postdoctoral fellow at Virginia Tech and the University of Pittsburgh. In 2017, he joined the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University to start his lab and synthetic biology research. His lab has made outstanding achievements with several publications at Nature Chemical Biology, Nature Communications, and ACS synthetic biology. In addition, he recently received the NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) award.
Nima Hajinajaf is currently a Ph.D. student of Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University in Prof. Varman’s Lab. He received his master’s in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tehran. His previous work was on “Photobioreactor optimization for CO2 removal and wastewater treatment by microalgae”. Currently, his work is on the Metabolic Engineering of Cyanobacteria and Bacteria to produce chemicals