Individual Members

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.

Jeffrey Barrick

Dr. Jeffrey E. Barrick is an Associate Professor of Molecular Biosciences and a member of the Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2001 and his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry from Yale University in 2006. Dr. Barrick performed his thesis research on the discovery and characterization of metabolite-sensing riboswitches in bacteria under the direction of Ronald Breaker. He was then a postdoctoral fellow from 2006 to 2010 with Richard Lenski at Michigan State University where he studied genome dynamics in a 25-year laboratory evolution experiment with Escherichia coli. His honors include an NSF CAREER Award, an NIH Pathway to Independence Award, and an RNA Society/Scaringe Young Scientist Award. Dr. Barrick’s research is at the interface of synthetic biology and microbial experimental evolution. His laboratory is interested in improving the reliability of biological engineering by developing methods to anticipate and prevent unwanted evolution of designed DNA sequences, in understanding how expanded genetic codes impact the evolutionary potential of organisms, and in engineering insect-associated bacterial symbionts for applications in agriculture. They create and maintain open-source software tools for identifying mutations in microbial genomes from next-generation DNA sequencing data (breseq) and for predicting DNA sequences prone to unwanted evolution (EFM Calculator).

Ranjan Srivastava

Ranjan Srivastava is Professor and Head of the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Additionally, he holds appointments in Biomedical Engineering and Environmental Engineering. He is also a faculty member of the Head and Neck Cancer/Oral Oncology Program at the University of Connecticut Health Center. Dr. Srivastava received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland-College Park. He held a joint post-doctoral fellowship in Chemical Engineering and Oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was an NIH Trainee. His research focus is on the understanding and application of evolutionary dynamics, whether “wet” or computational/algorithmic, to systems and synthetic biology. To that end, his group has used evolutionary approaches to evolve new mathematical models of biological systems, curate existing models at the genome scale via evolutionary algorithms, and optimize bioprocessing strategies.

Sang Yup Lee

Dr. Sang Yup Lee is Distinguished Professor at the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He is currently the Dean of KAIST Institutes, Director of BioProcess Engineering Research Center, and Director of Bioinformatics Research Center. He served as a Founding Dean of College of Life Science and Bioengineering. He has published more than 580 journal papers, 82 books/book chapters, and more than 630 patents, many of which licensed. He received numerous awards, including the National Order of Merit, National Science Medal, Ho-Am Prize, POSCO TJ Park Prize, the Best Scientist and Technologist Award, James Bailey Award, Merck Metabolic Engineering Award, Elmer Gaden Award, Charles Thom Award, and Marvin Johnson Award. Professor Lee also delivered numerous named lectures around the world. He is currently Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Microbiology, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, the World Academy of Sciences, Korean Academy of Science and Technology, National Academy of Engineering of Korea, and National Academy of Inventors USA. As of 2018, he is one of 13 people in the world elected as Foreign Associate of both National Academy of Engineering USA and National Academy of Sciences USA. He is honorary professor of University of Queensland, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Wuhan University, Hubei University of Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Jiangnan University, and Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology. He has served as the Chairman of the Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies and also Biotechnology, and is currently co-chair of the Global Future Council on Biotechnology and a member of the Global Future Council on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum. Prof. Lee is editor-in-chief of Biotechnology Journal (Wiley) and Metabolic Engineering (Elsevier), and also editor and editorial board member of many international journals. He founded the World Council on Industrial Biotechnology in 2010 and served as a Founding Chair for two years. He served as a member of the Presidential Advisory Council on Science and Technology of Korea and a member of Government Performance Evaluation Committee, and is currently serving as a member of the Central Strategic Committee of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance. His research areas are metabolic engineering, systems biology, synthetic biology, systems medicine, industrial biotechnology and nanobiotechnology.

Corey Hudson

Corey Hudson is a computational biologist at Sandia National Laboratories located in Livermore, California. He has a Ph.D. in Informatics from the University of Missouri. Corey has been at Sandia since 2013 and leads teams in cybersecurity, machine learning, synthetic biology and genomics. His principal work is modeling and simulating cybersecurity risks in realistic and large-scale genomic systems and highly automated synthetic biology facilities.

Arthur Prindle

Arthur received a BS in Chemical Engineering from Caltech and a PhD in Bioengineering from UCSD. As a Simons-Helen Hay Whitney Fellow in the Süel Laboratory at UCSD, he developed new approaches to decipher collective mechanisms underlying bacterial biofilm organization. In particular, how a conflict between cooperation and competition is resolved through collective metabolic oscillations that increase nutrient availability for sheltered interior cells. Arthur found that these oscillations are coordinated by ion channel-mediated electrochemical signals, revealing an unexpected functional similarity between ion channels in neurons and those in microbes. These findings serve to establish a prokaryotic paradigm for electrical signaling and hint at the extent to which unicellular bacteria are capable of behaving as a proto-multicellular organism. Arthur’s laboratory is currently working to leverage these exciting findings to develop a new synthetic biology toolbox based on ion channel-mediated electrochemical communication in bacterial communities. Arthur is currently an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University in the Center for Synthetic Biology and holds a CASI award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a Young Investigator award from the Army Research Office, and a Packard Fellowship.

Betul Kacar

Betul Kacar (Betül Kaçar) is an assistant professor at the University of Arizona Departments of Cell Biology and Astronomy She is also an associate professor at Earth-Life Science Institute of Tokyo Institute of Technology. She received her PhD from Emory University working jointly in the Department of Chemistry and the Emory School of Medicine. She was awarded a NASA Astrobiology Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2012 to bring abstractly reconstructed ancestral DNA sequences into the lab for physical, chemical and biological characterization by expressing inferred DNA sequences in modern organisms. Between 2014 and 2017 she lead an independent project funded by the John Templeton Foundation at Harvard University. In 2018, she moved her laboratory to University of Arizona where she is focusing on reconstructing key enzymatic intermediates between biological activity and global geochemical reservoirs throughout the Earth’s deep history. Betul is named a NASA Early Career Fellow in 2018.

Betul Kacar’s work has been recognized by various media outlets, such as NOVA Science, BBC Focus, New Scientist, WGBH, MIT Technology Review, SETI Institute, Astrobiology Magazine, Wired, Popular Science, PBS, iO9, CNN Turk, Quanta Magazine. She cares deeply about science education, outreach and communication, in 2012 she co-founded SAGANet,: The Online STEM Mentorship and Education Network, she serves on the Board of Advisory Committee of the MIT BioBuilder Foundation and was named “Way Cool Scientist” by the Science Club for Girls, USA in 2016.

Betul Kacar was recently awarded grants from the Templeton Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the NASA Exobiology and Evolutionary Biology Programs as well as Harvard Origins Initiative to continue this work deeper into the past and to resurrect greater portions of the universally shared ancestral genome. She is interested in understanding life’s origins, evolution and possible existence elsewhere in t

Chris Voigt

Ken Oye

Sri Kosuri

Farren Isaacs

Nigel Mouncey

Dr. Mouncey joined the DOE Joint Genome Institute in 2017 as the fourth Director in its 20-year history. After stints as a senior research scientist in molecular biology at Roche Vitamins, Inc. in New Jersey and DSM Nutritional Products in Switzerland, he joined Dow AgroSciences in Indianapolis in 2008 and served as Bioengineering and Bioprocessing R&D Director and Leader from 2011 onward. There, Mouncey directed a 70-member R&D team that supported the growth of a highly successful natural product insecticide that has since generated hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and significant societal benefit, through isolating, optimizing, and scaling-up of new production strains for commercial manufacturing by fermentation. He also built an integrated and highly effective bioprocessing team comprising high-throughput screening, metabolic engineering, engineering biology, systems biology, enzymology, protein expression, fermentation and analytical capabilities. His team also developed production strains and fermentation processes for other molecules such as a new fungicide, propionic acid and long-chain alcohols, as well as supporting the discovery of new crop traits.

Laurie Zoloth

Laurie Zoloth

A leader in the field of religious studies with particular scholarly interest in bioethics and Jewish studies, Laurie Zoloth’s research explores religion and ethics, drawing from sources ranging from Biblical and Talmudic texts to postmodern Jewish philosophy, including the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Her scholarship spans the ethics of genetic engineering, stem cell research, synthetic biology, social justice in health care, and how science and medicine are taught. She also researches the practices of interreligious dialogue, exploring how religion plays a role in public discussion and policy.

Zoloth is author of Health Care and the Ethics of Encounter: A Jewish Discussion of Social Justice and co-editor of five books, including Notes from a Narrow Ridge: Religion and Bioethics and Jews and Genes: The Genetic Future in Contemporary Jewish Thought.

Zoloth has been the president of the American Academy of Religion and the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. She was the inaugural director of the Jewish Studies program at San Francisco State University and director of graduate studies in religious studies at Northwestern. She is an elected member of the Hastings Center and a life member of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She is a founding board member of the Society for Scriptural Reasoning.

Her work on bioethics and health care led her to serve on the NASA Advisory Council, the space agency’s highest civilian advisory board; the International Planetary Protection Committee; the National Recombinant DNA Advisory Board, and the executive committee of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. She served as chair of the first bioethics advisory board at the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute and has testified in front of Congress, the President’s Commission on Bioethics, and state legislatures.

Zoloth began her career as a neonatal nurse working in impoverished communities; she holds a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from the University of California, Berkeley and a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of the State of New York. She received a master’s degree in Jewish studies and a doctorate in social ethics from the Graduate Theological Union. Zoloth also holds a master’s degree in English from San Francisco State University.

Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Zoloth served as a Charles McCormick Deering Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, holding appointments in the Department of Religious Studies in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and in the Feinberg School of Medicine. At Northwestern, she was founding director of the Brady Program in Ethics and Civic Life at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and founding director of the Center for Bioethics, Science and Society at the Feinberg School of Medicine.

She currently serves on the Ethics Advisory Board of NASA; the steering committee of The Engineering Biology Research Committee; on the CDC (Biological Agents Working Group); and on the Ethics Board of the American Heart Association.

Fuzhong Zhang

Peng Yin

Ron Weiss

Harris Wang

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