Applicants

  • Cresten Mansfeldt

    Cresten B. Mansfeldt is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he leads research at the intersection of synthetic biology, environmental microbiology, and wastewater surveillance and management. His work focuses on tracking and mitigating emerging contaminants, including synthetic biology products, within urban water systems. Prof. Mansfeldt has published extensively on microbial ecology, biotechnological risk, and post-fire water impacts, and actively bridges academic, regulatory, and community sectors to advance environmental resilience.

  • Rixin Zhang

    Tackle resource competition problems in synthetic biology, aiming to restore gene circuits’ modularity and build robust gene circuits.

  • sadikshya rijal

    Sadikshya Rijal is pursuing her PhD in biological design from Arizona State University. She is affiliated with Dr. Xiaojun Tian’s lab, which focuses on resource allocation of gene circuits and phase separation in bacterial systems.

  • Bojing Jiang

    Bojing Jiang is a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, with a focus on developing protein-based materials for biomedical and environmental applications. Her research integrates synthetic biology, materials science, and tissue engineering to create innovative biomaterials for regenerative medicine, drug delivery, and micro-nanofabrication. Bojing’s work emphasizes sustainability and biocompatibility, leveraging fully protein-based materials to design eco-friendly alternatives with enhanced functionality.

    She has contributed to groundbreaking projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including materials for neuron regeneration, vascular repair, and wound healing. Bojing has published in high-impact journals such as Science Advances and Advanced Functional Materials, with her research recognized for its role in advancing green and scalable nanofabrication techniques using protein-based resists.

    In addition to her technical expertise, Bojing excels in protein design, gene editing, fermentation, and biomaterials characterization, with a commitment to developing solutions that bridge scientific innovation and real-world impact. She is passionate about contributing to the next generation of healthcare technologies while advancing sustainability in the field of biomedical engineering.

  • Sana Zakaria

    Sana Zakaria is a Research Leader, and a Global RAND Scholar working emerging technologies and their intersection. Her work focusses on assessing the societal and biosecurity implications of technological advancement, and unpacking the factors affecting technology demand and supply, assessing oversight mechanisms for technology, and building resilience and preparedness in society.
    She is currently leading on evaluating the PATH-SAFE programme, a pilot programme on interconnectivity of the UK-wide genomic
    biosurveillance ecosystem. She is working with UK MoD on bioattribution workflows and capacity building. Her other key project involves assessing oversight mechanisms in embryology, brain computer interfaces, engineering biology and organoids. She is also leading on a project developing a global risk index to manage dual use risks from AI powered biological tools. She currently sits on an expert scientific group to the BWC to provide expert advice on science and technology mechanism, compliance and verification and international cooperation and assistance.

  • Chris Vaiana

  • Jaya Joshi

    Jaya Joshi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Wood Science, Bioproducts, and Bioengineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research walks through enzyme design space: exploring fitness landscapes for radical metabolic engineering design ideas, with the goal of achieving successful carbon farming by 2050. The overarching aim of her research program is to transform inefficient designer biocatalysts into highly active enzymes by applying novel enzyme improvement strategies, such as continuous directed evolution and machine learning. Jaya earned her PhD in Cell and Molecular Biology from Western University and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in 2017. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Andrew Hanson at the University of Florida in 2020 before joining Dr. Vincent Martin’s lab at the Centre for Structural and Functional Genomics in Montreal, where she explored the immense potential of biofoundries in synthetic biology. Exploring automation and synthetic biology tool development remains central to Jaya’s research at the University of British Columbia.

  • Luis Joel Figueroa-Yáñez

    PhD. Luis Joel Figueroa-Yáñez is Researcher class A, repatriated, belongs to the National System of Researchers (Level I), assigned to the Center for Research and Assistance in Technology and Design of Jalisco State (CIATEJ), México.
    He has a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the Universidad Veracruzana, a Master’s degree in Bioethics from the Universidad Anáhuac, a PhD in Biological Sciences from the Yucatán Scientific Research Center and a postdoctoral degree at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis Missouri, United States of America.
    It has publications on:
    -CRISPR-Cas and pathogenic organisms
    -Neural networks, deep learning and artificial intelligence in pancreatic cancer
    -The DBTL paradigm in Synthetic Biology and Synthetic Biology and COVID-19
    -Antioxidants and type 2 diabetes mellitus
    -Improvement of plants to counteract the greenhouse effect and other factors
    -CRISPR-Cas9 and dCas9 in yeast

  • Priyanka Nain

    I am Priyanka Nain, currently working as a postdoctoral researcher in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at the University of Delaware. Here, my research revolves around finding innovative solutions that integrate synthetic biology, sustainability, and healthcare. My Ph.D. is from the Chemical Engineering Department at IIT Delhi, where I was developing strategies to improve the production of biotherapeutic proteins. I am deeply passionate about sustainable biomanufacturing. I thrive on the scientific challenges involved in scaling up bioprocesses, from optimizing cell lines and media to fine-tuning fermentation feeding and control strategies, and analytical methods. But I also care deeply about the broader impact – delivering products that are both effective and accessible and manufactured in the interest of the environment.

  • Sarah Hartley

    Technology governance is concerned with the decisions that shape how technology is funded, developed, regulated, tested, and deployed – it determines technology trajectories. My social science research takes a critical look at the politics and power in these governance decisions, particularly in efforts to open-up these expert spaces to diverse knowledge, values and visions through engagement and knowledge co-production – features that have become prevalent in technology governance in recent years. I’m particularly interested in the value tensions that exist in and between science and society when governance decisions are opened-up and, importantly, how to manage these tensions more effectively. I focus on the development and risk assessment of emerging technologies, particularly the biotechnologies (gene drive, genome-editing, genetic modification of animals, especially insects) and AL/digital technology applications in environment and agriculture. I am Co-Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence.

  • Willy A. Valdivia-Granda

    I am the founder of Orion Integrated Biosciences. I lead a group of researchers developing new techniques to decode microbes’ genomic information and map short DNA fragments to their source of origin, virulence, and possible genetic manipulation. My research includes the use of artificial intelligence algorithms including large language models, neural networks, and generative adversarial networks to design a new generation of biotentities for biotechnology applications. I also lead the advancement of a new generation of analytical tools for risk assessment and early warning of biothreats that can affect health, trade, and national security. This work includes processing large data sets from multiple sources, including geospatial, trade, news outlets, security, and economic signals and indicators using machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. I have research projects with collaborators in several countries within the European Union, New Zealand, Guinea, Ukraine, Colombia, and Brazil. I serve as a subject matter expert and adviser to several funding agencies and policymakers within the U.S. government, and Hong Kong Research Council overseeing funding programs of more than USD 200 Million. This role not only underscores the significance of our work but also facilitates the integration of computer science principles into the development of solutions for pressing global challenges in health and security.

  • Alexander Refsnes Andrassy

    Research in cell culture models and synthetic biology innovations

  • Tiara Rahayu

    Tiara is Biotechnology enthusiast. Loving the world with collaboration in science, content creator, leadership in community, moderator event, and science communicator. My interests are about Biomedical informatics, genetic for disease, cancer genomics and precision oncology such as biomarkers. I have a sharing platform on @ngolabs for expand my network and get out more knowledge. Now, I’m being student research in National Research and Innovation Agency for handling Biomarker of HPV.

  • Elizabeth Kellogg

    Elizabeth Kellogg did her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley and received a PhD from the University of Washington, working on computational biology in the group of David Baker. She then became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Eva Nogales at UC Berkeley using cryo-electron microscopy. Her scientific background results in a scientific approach that seeks to understand biology with a quantitative perspective, relying on biological structure determination and design. Since starting her own group at Cornell University in 2019, Dr. Kellogg has sought to understand how transposons reshape genomes and how they can be repurposed as genome-editing tools. In particular, her group has investigated the behavior and molecular mechanisms of programmable, CRISPR-associated transposons (CASTs), to determine how DNA integration is regulated spatially and temporally in a genomic context, using a combination of biochemical, structural, single-molecule and genetic approaches. Among other honors, Dr. Kellogg was selected as Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2021 and received the 2023 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society. She joined St. Jude as an Associate Member in 2023.

  • Geoff Baldwin

    Geoff Baldwin is Professor of Synthetic & Molecular Biology at Imperial College London, he is Co-Director of the Imperial College Centre for Synthetic Biology and Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in BioDesign Engineering. Research work in the Baldwin lab focuses on the development of synthetic biology approaches to facilitate the engineering of new biological systems for real-world applications. To this end he has developed foundational tools that transform our ability to rapidly prototype new biological designs, like DNA-BOT, automated DNA assembly based on the BASIC method. These fundamental developments are being applied across a broad range of projects that address gene circuit design; RNA feedback control and in vivo directed evolution for the generation of new protein specificity and functionality. Recently he has been developing new AI based approaches to enhance our ability to engineer new biological systems with human interpretable outcomes and only sparse sampling of the design space.

  • Robert Ziman

    Robert is a research software engineer with a decade of experience supporting bioinformatics and computational biology projects in both academia and industry. He was a bioinformatics programmer at The Centre for Applied Genomics in Toronto, a bioinformatics associate at Genentech in South San Francisco, and a research associate in the Cohen Lab for Aging, Systems, and Statistics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec. He co-founded and co-hosted the Longevity Biotech Show podcast and has been observing the longevity biotech scene since the early 2000s. Robert holds a B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto.

  • Dr. Muhammad Saad Ahmed

    The main research interest of Dr. Ahmed is to focus on industrially important metabolites production in microbes through the application of system metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. Previously, Dr. Ahmed developed industrially competitive microbial strains that were capable of producing industrially important secondary metabolites, for instance, β-amyrin, squalene, etc., and these strains are highly efficient for commercialization. Moreover, Dr. Ahmed expanded his research interest toward other industrially important metabolites, i.e., fragrance, flavor, and drugs, that might be in the category of alkaloids, sesquiterpenoids, monoterpenoids, diterpenoids, triterpenoids, and tetraterpenoids. These metabolites are normally used in pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, and cosmeceuticals industries as raw materials for the production of medicines, foods, and cosmetics.

  • Bojing Jiang

  • Jason Kang

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