Individual Members

  • Erin Garza

    Dr. Garza received her master’s and PhD in microbiology from Northern Illinois University. Her graduate work involved genetically engineering biofuel pathways, like homoethanol and butanol, into Escherichia coli. Dr. Garza completed a postdoc at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) where she is currently a staff scientist in the synthetic biology department. Her research involves genetically engineering bacteria and diatoms to produce compounds of interest, elucidating plastic degradation pathways in marine organisms, domesticating and characterizing genetic parts for DNA cloning libraries, and developing and optimizing cloning techniques for non-model organisms.

    Dr. Garza has worked on numerous research projects, but her main interest involves studying the microbiome of deep-sea plastics in an attempt to locate and engineer new plastic degrading organisms and to determine the effects of plastic pollution on the ocean and its ecology. She is currently working towards attaining an assistant professor position at JCVI.

  • Michaelle Mayalu

    Dr. Michaëlle N. Mayalu is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering. She received her Ph.D., M.S., and B.S., degrees in Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in the Computing and Mathematical Sciences Department. She was a 2017 California Alliance Postdoctoral Fellowship Program recipient and a 2019 Burroughs Wellcome Fund Postdoctoral Enrichment Program award recipient. She is also a 2023 Hypothesis Fund Grantee.
    Dr. Michaëlle N. Mayalu’s area of expertise is in mathematical modeling and control theory of synthetic biological and biomedical systems. She is interested in the development of control theoretic tools for understanding, controlling, and predicting biological function at the molecular, cellular, and organismal levels to optimize therapeutic intervention.

  • Virginia Cornish

    Virginia W. Cornish is the Helena Rubinstein Chair in the Department of Chemistry and a founding member of the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University. Her research brings together modern methods in synthetic chemistry and DNA technology to expand the synthetic capabilities of living cells, and she is a pioneer in the field of yeast synthetic biology. Her current research focuses on translating state-of-the-art synthetic biology platforms to the clinic. She has over 100 research publications and issued patents and has been supported by grants from the NIH, NSF, DARPA, USDA, and numerous private foundations. Virginia has been recognized by an NSF Career Award (2000), a Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2003), the Columbia College John Jay Award (2005), the Protein Society Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award (2009), the American Chemical Society Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (2009), and an HHMI Gilliam Adviser (2021). She graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in Biochemistry in 1991, where she did undergraduate research with Professor Ronald Breslow. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry with Professor Peter Schultz at the University of California at Berkeley and then was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biology Department at M.I.T. under the guidance of Professor Robert Sauer. Virginia joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at Columbia in 1999 and was promoted Associate Professor with tenure in 2004, Professor in 2007, and Helena Rubinstein Chair in 2011.

  • Otto Cordero

    Otto X. Cordero received a B.S. in computer and electrical engineering from the Polytechnic University of Ecuador, an M.Sc. in artificial intelligence from Utrecht University, and a Ph.D. in theoretical biology, also from Utrecht University. In 2014 Cordero received the ERC Starting grant in Europe and in 2015 he moved to MIT, where he has since been a member of the faculty. Cordero is a past Sloan Fellow in Ocean Sciences and recipient of the Simons Early Career Award in Marine Microbial Ecology. In 2017, Cordero co-founded PriME, a new Simons Collaboration that brings together physicists, biologists and engineers to decipher the rules that govern the assembly and functioning of marine microbial ecosystems.

  • Maobing Tu

    Dr Maobing Tu is a professor in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He received his PhD degree in Forestry Bioenergy at the University of British Columbia (2007). Dr. Tu is a recipient of Industrial R&D Fellowship from Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and an NSF CAREER award in 2013. His research is centered on the development of cost-effective processes for producing biofuels and chemicals from renewable resources and waste. Specifically, he focuses on the interface between biomass processing chemistry and biochemical engineering in the production of fuels, chemicals and biomaterials. He has published more than 60 papers and received funding from NSF, DOE and EPA.

  • Jonathan Conway

    Dr. Jonathan Conway earned his B.S. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University under the guidance of Dr. Robert Kelly, focusing on lignocellulose degradation by extremely thermophilic bacteria. After completing his Ph.D., he trained as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in Dr. Jeff Dangl’s lab, where he worked on engineering the plant root microbiome.

    In 2021, Dr. Conway established his independent lab in the Chemical & Biological Engineering department at Princeton University. He is also an associated faculty member of the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. The Conway lab focuses on genetically engineering non-model bacteria at plant-microbe interfaces. By mechanistically defining and engineering plant-microbe interactions, the lab aims to develop technologies for the bio-agriculture, bio-energy, and bio-chemical industries.

  • marie migaud

    I am a French-trained Chemist/Chemical Engineer with a PhD in organic synthesis from Michigan State University, postdoctoral training at the University of Bath and Oxford. My first independent academic position was at Queen’s University Belfast (Chemistry) in 2000. I was appointed first in faculty of science and engineering, then requested a joint appointment with the Center for Cell Biology and Cancer Research, and ultimately moved to the School of Pharmacy to fully exploit the collaborative network that my moving within the institution had allowed me to create. In 2016, I left my permanent UK academic position to join the Mitchell Cancer Institute at the University of South Alabama, after a sabbatical year in the department of Biochemistry at the Carver College of Medicine in Iowa. I seek to accelerate translational research programs through basic research in chemical biology and synthetic chemistry.
    More specifically, I pursue chemical research on canonical and non-canonical nucleotides and dinucleotides in the context of cell bioenergetics and signaling. I direct biology-focused research projects supported by bespoke organic synthesis and knowledge-based metabolomics and RNA/DNAomics research. My laboratory’s activities focus on synthesizing nucleosidic isotopologues, nucleotide-derived cofactors, and catabolites and develop analytical platforms that help unravel their role in diseases linked to genomic and metabolic mitochondrial dysfunction. Key to our research efforts are novel synthetic methodologies of isotopically labeled and modified nucleos/tides using mechanochemistry to allow atom-efficient syntheses.

  • Carolyn Chapman

    Carolyn Riley Chapman, PhD MS, joined the Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard (MRCT Center) in October 2023 (mrctcenter.org). She is a Member of the Faculty of the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Lead Investigator in the Division of Global Health Equity (DGHE), Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her work involves collaboration with diverse stakeholders to identify and address challenges in the research and development of genetic technologies and precision medicine, including cell and gene therapies. Since April 2023, Dr. Chapman serves as Co-Chair of the ELSI-Dedicated Genome Engineering Workgroup at the Center for Synthetic Regulatory Genomics (SyRGe), led by Dr. Jef Boeke, the Sol and Judith Bergstein Director of the Institute of Systems Genetics and Professor, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Prior to joining the MRCT Center, Carolyn worked at NYU Grossman School of Medicine in various roles. Immediately before joining the MRCT Center, she was Faculty in the Center for Human Genetics and Genomics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine with a primary appointment as Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Population Health (Division of Medical Ethics). In the past, Carolyn has worked as an Associate/Lecturer and as Interim Associate Director for the Columbia Bioethics program; as a business strategy management consultant in the biopharmaceuticals industry at L.E.K. Consulting; at a start-up biopharmaceutical company, Aton Pharma; and as a freelance science/medical writer. Carolyn graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College with a BA in Biology. She has a PhD in Genetics from Harvard University and an MS in Bioethics from Columbia University. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship in medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a Graduate Certificate in Survey Research at UConn’s School of Public Policy.

  • Javin Oza

    Engineering of cell-free systems, proteins & enzymes, and adopting bioengineering to the university classroom

  • Rabia Yazicigil

    Rabia Yazicigil is an Assistant Professor of ECE Department at Boston University. She was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT and received her Ph.D. degree from Columbia University in 2016. Her research focuses on the development of Cyber-Secure Biological Systems, leveraging living sensors constructed from engineered biological entities seamlessly integrated with custom-designed semiconductor chips. This unique synergy harnesses the advantages of biology while incorporating the reliability and communication infrastructure of electronics, offering a unique solution to societal challenges in healthcare, environmental monitoring, and sustainable biomanufacturing. She has received numerous awards, including the NSF CAREER Award (2024), Early Career Excellence in Research Award for the Boston University College of Engineering (2024), the Catalyst Foundation Award (2021), Boston University ENG Dean Catalyst Award (2021), and “Electrical Engineering Collaborative Research Award” for her Ph.D. research (2016). She was selected as a member of the 2024 National Academy of Engineering (NAE) US Frontiers of Engineering (USFOE) cohort.

  • Reza Zadegan

  • R. Clay Wright

    Clay Wright is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. His lab focuses on understanding and engineering chemical signaling pathways from plants and fungi. Clay received his BS in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from North Carolina State University and PhD in the same from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked with Professor Marc Ostermeier to engineer cancer therapeutic enzymes that are selectively active in the presence of a cancer marker. For his postdoctoral research, he worked with Professors Jennifer Nemhauser and Eric Klavins at University of Washington to study evolution and function of receptors for auxin, a critical plant growth hormone. Clay was recently awarded an NIH MIRA to further our understanding and engineering of chemically activated ubiquitin ligases, such as those that coordinate auxin signaling and other plant hormone signaling pathways.

  • Eric Young

    Eric Young received undergraduate degrees in Chemical Engineering and Biological Engineering from the University of Maine at Orono. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. He completed postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology developing the MIT-Broad Foundry. Dr. Young is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, with affiliate appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His research objective is to understand and engineer microbes that improve the human condition. This research program informs his educational goal – to train the current and future workforce for an economy shaped by engineered biology.

  • Fan Hong

    Fan is interested in developing biomolecular tools to dive into the complexity of biology (decoding and regulating cellular functions on the molecular basis at the tissue scale). Before joining the faculty at the University of Florida, Fan was a Postdoc Fellow at Wyss Institute at Harvard University where he worked on the DNA advanced in situ spatial multi-omics (e.g., DNA thermal-plex) in the Yin Lab. Thermal-plex enables multiplexed fluorescent imaging of biomolecules with unprecedented feasibility and speed for tissue biospecimen analysis. Fan completed his Ph.D. at Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University and worked in the Yan Lab, Green Lab, and Sulc Lab, where he developed methods to program nucleic acids in vitro (e.g., Framework DNA nanoarchitecture), in vivo (e.g., SNIPR), and in silico (e.g., crowder-oxDNA) to address grand questions with chemical approaches to biology. Those methods enable the control of nucleic acid folding into complex framework biomolecular architectures from the nanoscale to the macroscale, the regulation of cellular gene expression based on the single nucleotide mutation in cells with de-novo-designed RNA riboregulators, and the investigation of the biophysical behavior of nucleic acid folding in the crowding cellular environment with molecular dynamics.

  • Miguel Jimenez

    Miguel Jimenez is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, where he runs el Microbial Integration Group. The group integrates engineered microorganisms with mechanical and electronic devices for applications in human health, agriculture, the environment, and entertainment.

  • Lynn Rothschild

    Lynn Rothschild is passionate astrobiologist focusing on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and elsewhere, while at the same time pioneering the use of engineering biology to enable space exploration. Her research focuses on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. A graduate of Yale, Indiana University and Brown, she has brought her imagination and creativity to the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, articulating a vision for the future of synthetic biology as an enabling technology for NASA’s missions, including human space exploration and astrobiology. From 2011 through 2019 she served as the faculty advisor of the Stanford-Brown iGEM team. Her lab tested these plans in space on in the PowerCell secondary payload on the DLR EuCROPIS satellite. A past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, she is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club. She was awarded the Isaac Asimov Award from the American Humanist Association, and the Horace Mann Award from Brown University. She has been a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellow seven times. Lynn was formerly Professor (Adjunct) at Stanford where she taught “Astrobiology and Space Exploration” for a decade.

  • Ian Blaby

    Dr Blaby received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK, as a Medical Research Council (MRC) fellowship recipient. After post-doctoral positions at the University of Florida and UCLA (supported by an NIH fellowship), he co-led a DOE Science Focus Area centered on functional genomics of phototrophs at Brookhaven National Laboratory, NY. Since 2019 he heads the DNA synthesis platform at the Joint Genome Institute, where he leads three groups focused on HTP DNA design and assembly, strain engineering and bioinformatic tool development/data analysis.

  • Channabasavaiah Gurumurthy

    CB Gurumurthy (Guru), BVSC, MVSC, PHD, Exec MBA is the Director of Mouse Genome Engineering Core Facility at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), Omaha, Nebraska and he is also a professor in the department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Anatomy. He develops and improves mouse genome editing technologies. In collaboration with Dr Masato Ohtsuka, Tokai University, Japan, he has published several landmark papers on CRISPR genome engineering technologies. Two of their breakthrough technologies, Easi-CRISPR and i-GONAD, are now widely adapted at core facilities and laboratories. Several hundreds to thousands of mouse models are generated each year using their methods. Guru has received over 100 invitations within USA and over 20 invitations from 12 countries to deliver keynote talks or presentations, to organize workshops and to chair sessions at conferences. He is one of the six researchers to receive inaugural Outstanding Genomic Innovator award from the National Human Genome Research Institute.

  • Nils Averesch

    Nils is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Science, University of Florida (UF). Before joining UF, Nils was a Research Engineer at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University and an Associate Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Space Science and Astrobiology Division. Nils holds a PhD in Metabolic Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia and an engineer’s degree in Biochemical Engineering from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany.

    Nils’ research comprises the rational engineering of microbial metabolism to increase the carbon efficiency of biochemical pathways for the assimilation of single-carbon compounds and the conversion thereof into advanced biomaterials. This serves the overarching goal to create a sustainable chemical industry on Earth “on the way” to new frontiers: developing circular production platforms based on microbial biotechnology could one day also support crewed long-duration space-exploration missions and -settlement.

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