Anna Duraj-Thatte received her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology, wherein she worked on protein engineering and directed evolution. Then she pursued her postdoctoral research at Wyss Institute, Harvard University. Dr. Duraj-Thatte’s research focuses on designing and developing novel strategies to produce smart engineered living materials (ELMs) by integrating the fields of synthetic biology, materials engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence (AI). Over the last eight years, she has been developing the field of ELMs by demonstrating one of the first examples of therapeutic living materials and macroscopic transient self-regenerating
materials for environmental applications. Her research work has also been featured in global media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, New Scientist, CBS Boston, and Science Alert. She received the Grand Prize in the American National Science Foundation (NSF) Idea Machine competition. She was also selected as a Deep Tech Pioneer and member of Harvard Innovation Lab’s Venture Incubation Program.

Gozde was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey and received her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Koc University in 2015. Gozde completed her Chemical Engineering Ph.D. at UC Berkeley with Prof. Markita Landry in 2020. During her Ph.D. studies, she developed nanotechnologies for plant genetic engineering. For her postdoctoral work, Gozde joined Prof. Siobhan Brady’s lab at UC Davis, where she studied nutrient use efficiency of tomato and developed high-throughput functional genomics tools to study transcriptional regulation in crops.

Dr. Atkinson’s research aims to use approaches from synthetic biology, protein engineering, biophysics and electrochemistry to understand and control how microbes and proteins transport electrons. The Atkinson Lab seeks to elucidate the critical role electron transport plays in energy and information processing in cells and microbial communities and to use this knowledge to engineer new biotechnologies that address societal challenges in sustainability, environmental monitoring & remediation, chemical synthesis, and resource recovery & extraction. Areas of current emphasis are the development and application of design rules for (i) how microorganisms use proteins to regulate electron transfer in metabolic networks, (ii) how electron flows shape the structure of microbial communities that impact geochemical cycles, and (iii) how living electronic materials can be built that couple the information processing and catalytic capabilities of biology with electrochemical devices.

Ilenne Del Valle is a Research Staff Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Chile and her Ph.D. in Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology from Rice University, where she worked in the Silberg and Masiello lab. Following her Ph.D., she served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Eckert lab at ORNL. Currently, her research focuses on engineering new synthetic biology tools to facilitate ecosystem engineering, with a specific emphasis on environmental, energy, and sustainability applications.

Dr. Leili Rohani is a Stem Cell Scientist at the School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia, and upcoming Research Scientist at MIT Synthetic Biology Center and Department of Biological Engineering. Her research has been focused on stem cells, regenerative medicine, cell therapy, and cell-fate engineering with the intent to provide a platform for future gene and precision therapies for heart diseases. She is passionate about combining tissue engineering, single-nuclei RNA sequencing and synthetic biology tools to create a human single cell atlas of heart disease as a basis for understanding, diagnosing, monitoring, and treating heart diseases. Her end goal is to look at the SynBio platform (tissue engineering, single nuclei RNAseq, synthetic biology) as a new vocabulary for disease studies to determine the ways in which cells and disease genes act, which cells are disrupted in disease, which programs change in them, what mechanisms underlie their (dis)regulation, how their cell-cell communications are affected, and what would be the impact of therapies. Beyond her research, she is passionate about science communication, networking, and collaboration.