Member Directory

Elizabeth Pitts

Elizabeth A. Pitts is an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Composition, Literacy, Pedagogy, and Rhetoric program. She received her PhD in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media from North Carolina State University with a minor in Genetic Engineering and Society, and she also holds a BA and MA in English from Georgetown University.

Elizabeth’s research blends rhetorical theory, organizational studies, and science studies to examine how technologies influence the nature of professional work and professional identity. Her current book project offers insights into a movement to make the coding of DNA as pervasive as the coding of software. By drawing parallels between the composition of genetically engineered organisms and the composition of persuasive speech and writing, the book facilitates humanistic inquiry into the material practices undertaken in laboratories.

Elizabeth enjoys interdisciplinary collaboration and has co-authored with geneticists, ecologists, and policy scholars. Her work is informed by her decade of experience as a professional writer and speechwriter at the White House, the US Department of Education, and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

James Chappell

Our lab focuses on understanding how the biomolecule RNA can be designed to create synthetic regulators of gene expression—allowing for the manipulation of natural cellular processes to elicit deeper biological understanding and for the engineering of new synthetic cellular functions. As such our lab focuses both on the creation of new gene regulatory tools and their application.

Robert Egbert

Dr. Robert Egbert (Rob) is a staff scientist in the Biological Sciences Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). Dr. Egbert is an expert in bacterial genetic circuit design and genome engineering. He received dual-BS degrees in electrical engineering and Korean at Brigham Young University, a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Washington working with Eric Klavins, and a joint appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with Adam Arkin. He currently leads a DOE program in Secure Biosystems Design on novel genome remodeling approaches to control the persistence of engineered functions in the environment, is Integration Lead for a PNNL-led team for the DARPA Friend or Foe program, and is Co-PI for data-driven synthetic biology within the DARPA Synergistic Discovery and Design program. Dr. Egbert is also the Science Lead for an PNNL internal investment in synthetic biology and biosecurity. Outside of work, Rob loves adventures with his wife and three children: swimming, kayaking, and river rafting in lakes and rivers of the mountain West; backpacking in the Pacific Northwest, Utah red rocks, and Canadian Rocky Mountains; and pinball. Rob also enjoys playing competitive ultimate frisbee.

Marcella Gomez

Marcella M. Gomez is an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz in the department of Applied Mathematics. She received her PhD from Caltech in 2015 and a B.S. from UC Berkeley in 2009; both degrees in Mechanical Engineering. Her research interests include a dynamical systems and control theoretic approach to synthetic and systems biology.

Alessandra Eustáquio

Alessandra has been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy of the University of Illinois at Chicago since August 2015. She also holds an appointment with the Center for Biomolecular Sciences. The Eustaquio laboratory aims to contribute to drug discovery and development from natural products. The Eustaquio lab uses open-source bioinformatics tools to predict the biosynthetic potential of bacteria based on their genome sequences. We then carry out genetic engineering to activate expression of silent genes and obtain the encoded natural products. We are also interested in developing synthetic biology tools to facilitate access to natural and engineered compounds. Before joining the faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Alessandra was a Principal Scientist at Pfizer, Medicinal Chemistry, Natural Products group. Prior to that, she had done postdoctoral training at the University of California San Diego, obtained a PhD in Pharmaceutical Biology from the University of Tuebingen, Germany, and a B.Sc. in Pharmacy & Biochemistry from the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Ophelia Venturelli

Dr. Ophelia Venturelli is an Assistant Professor in Biochemistry, Bacteriology and Chemical & Biological Engineering at UW-Madison. She began her appointment in July 2016 after completing a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship at UC Berkeley in the laboratory of Dr. Adam P. Arkin. Dr. Venturelli’s postdoctoral research focused on microbial community dynamics and strategies to manipulate intracellular resource allocation. She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics in 2013 from Caltech with Richard M. Murray, where she studied single-cell dynamics and the role of feedback loops in a metabolic gene regulatory network. The Venturelli lab focuses on understanding and engineering microbial communities using synthetic biology. Dr. Venturelli received the Shaw Scientist Award (2017), ARO Young Investigator Award (2017) and the NIH Outstanding Investigator Award (2017).

Huimin Zhao

Dr. Huimin Zhao is the Steven L. Miller Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering, and professor of chemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, and bioengineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received his B.S. degree in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992 and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1998 under the guidance of Nobel Laureate Dr. Frances Arnold. Prior to joining UIUC in 2000, he was a project leader at the Industrial Biotechnology Laboratory of the Dow Chemical Company. He was promoted to full professor in 2008. Dr. Zhao has authored and co-authored over 300 research articles and over 25 issued and pending patent applications with several being licensed by industry. In addition, he has given over 370 plenary, keynote, or invited lectures. Twenty-six (26) of his former graduate students and postdocs are pursuing academic careers. Dr. Zhao received numerous research and teaching awards and honors. His primary research interests are in the development and applications of synthetic biology tools to address society’s most daunting challenges in health, energy, and sustainability, and in the fundamental aspects of enzyme catalysis, cell metabolism, gene regulation, and cell differentiation.

Kevin Solomon

Dr. Kevin Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. His work studies animal microbiomes to develop novel microbial platforms for sustainable biomanufacturing and depolymerization of polymeric waste substrates. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering from McMaster University (Canada) and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from MIT. As part of his graduate work, Dr. Solomon developed new tools to increase biomanufacturing efficiency. His research and mentorship, at the intersection of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology, were recognized with multiple awards including a Lemelson Presidential Fellowship, an NSERC Julie Payette Award, and a Science Education Leadership Award from SynBERC. As a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Barbara, he applied the latest advances in sequencing technologies to study how anaerobic fungi degrade lignocellulose and identify new tools for synthetic biology. Using these techniques, he spearheaded efforts to molecularly characterize in depth a class of elusive microbes with tremendous potential for biofuel production, agriculture, and drug discovery. His work is supported by the NSF, DOE, private trusts and industry.

Jesse Zalatan

Jesse Zalatan is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Washington. His research focuses on understanding the physical organizing principles of biological networks in systems such as cell signaling, metabolism, and gene regulation, using methods ranging from mechanistic enzymology to synthetic biology. Jesse did his graduate work with Dan Herschlag on the mechanisms of enzyme-catalyzed phosphoryl transfer reactions. He performed postdoctoral research with Wendell Lim, where he studied mechanisms for controlling specificity in cell signaling networks.

Neha Kamat

The Kamat Lab’s interests lie in constructing minimal systems, or artificial cells, as a tool to understand and recreate certain cellular behaviors. They use emerging engineering methods in material science and synthetic biology to construct in vitro models of cellular membranes that can couple membrane biophysical processes to chemical and genetic processes, yielding new cellular mimetic biomaterials, capable of complex sensing, signaling, and responsive behaviors. Their particular interests lie in understanding the role of the bilayer membrane in mechanical force sensing and designing biosensors for environmental analytes. Neha received a BS in Bioengineering from Rice University and a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently holds a Young Investigator Award from the Air Force Research Office.

Rebecca Schulman

Rebecca Schulman is an associate professor in the Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Institute for Nanobiotechnology and the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics at The Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on the development of intelligent and adaptive biomolecular materials and nanostructures and combines ideas from materials science, circuit design and cell-free synthetic biology. Dr. Schulman joined JHU after working as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellowship in physics at UC Berkeley. She received undergraduate degrees in mathematics and computer science from MIT and a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. Recent awards include a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, DARPA Young Faculty Award and Directors Fellowship, an NSF Career Award, a Turing Scholar Award and a DOE Early Career Award

Jean Peccoud

Dr. Peccoud’s research program focuses on synthetic biology informatics. His group combines computational and experimental efforts to develop predictive models of behaviors encoded in synthetic DNA sequences. He is particularly interested in using methods from synthetic biology to optimize biomanufacturing processes used to produce biologic drugs, antibodies, and other proteins of commercial interest. Peccoud is also actively engaged in efforts to understand the security implications of synthetic biology.

Shortly after completing a graduate research project in molecular immunology, Jean Peccoud’s scientific interests shifted to computational biology. In 1989, he published one of the first articles describing a mathematical model of molecular noise in gene regulatory networks. In 1993, he recognized the importance of real-time PCR and developed new statistical techniques suitable to analyze this new type of data. In 2002, he observed with excitement the very early developments of synthetic biology. After exploring the potential applications of this new technology to plant biotechnology, he blazed a trail in synthetic biology informatics.

Jean Peccoud came to Colorado State University from the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. He brought with him a diverse experience that includes working for Fortune 500 and start-up companies. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Synthetic Biology published by Oxford University Press.

Brian Pfleger

Brian received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University in 2000 and earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2005 from the University of California-Berkeley. Brian was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan from 2005-2007. Brian is currently the Jay and Cynthia Ihlenfeld Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UW-Madison with an appointment in the Microbiology Doctoral Training Program. Brian’s research group uses systems and synthetic biology approaches to develop biocatalysts for production of small molecules. Brian’s research has been recognized with young investigator awards from 3M, NSF (CAREER), DOE (Early Career), the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR-YIP), Biotechnology and Bioengineering (Daniel IC Wang Award), the Society of Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology, the American Chemical Society BIOT Division (2018 YI Award), and Purdue University (Mellichamp lectureship). Brian also received the Benjamin Smith Reynolds teaching award from the UW-Madison College of Engineering for his efforts to introduce undergraduates to biotechnology.

Wilson Wong

Wilson Wong is a faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and a core member of the BU Biological Design Center. His lab is focused on developing synthetic biology tools in mammalian systems for cell-based therapy. He is the recipient of many awards, including the NIH New Innovator, NSF CAREER, and ACS Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award. He received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley and Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from UCLA with Dr. James Liao. He was an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Scholar at UCSF with Dr. Wendell Lim (primary advisor) and Dr. Arthur Weiss.

Jonathan Silberg

Prof. Silberg obtained Bachelor of Science degrees in Biology and Chemistry at the University of California Irvine, and a PhD in Biology at the University of California Irvine. He continued his postdoctoral research in Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Joff joined the Department of Biosciences at Rice University as an Assistant Professor in 2004 and is now the Stewart Memorial Professor of Biochemistry with joint appointments in the Departments of Bioengineering and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. His research focuses on applying synthetic biology across the cell/material interface with the goals of understanding the effects of environmental matrices (soils and sediments) on microbial behaviors and creating microbes that communicate electrically with devices (bioelectronics).

Lingchong You

Lingchong You is Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. His laboratory explores design principles of biological networks and uses synthetic gene circuits for applications in computation, engineering, and medicine.

Tobias Giessen

Tobias Giessen is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He grew up in Germany and attended Philipps-University Marburg in Hesse to study chemistry. Winning an Erasmus Fellowship, he spent two semester at Imperial College London, UK in the group of Alan Armstrong working on the total synthesis of bioactive marine natural products before graduating with a M.Sc. His Ph.D. training was with Mohamed A. Marahiel where he focused on the discovery and biosynthesis of novel antibiotics, graduating in 2013. As a Leopoldina Fellow, he completed his postdoctoral training with Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School working on the discovery and engineering of microbial protein organelles before joining the University of Michigan in 2019. His lab is currently focused on mining microbial genomes for novel protein organelle systems involved in various cellular functions including stress resistance, detoxification and pathogenicity. By utilizing these newly discovered protein compartments and organelles he aims to design and build functional protein assemblies and integrate them with advanced genetic circuits to tackle real world problems in biomedicine, catalysis and sustainability. These efforts will result in novel living diagnostics and therapeutics, programmable nanomaterials and intracellular nanoreactors. In 2017, he was awarded the Leopoldina Prize from the German National Academy of Sciences.

Srivatsan Raman

My career path has taken me from process engineer in a petroleum refinery to a computational biologist, biochemist and now a synthetic biologist. A career in research was not what I had in mind after finishing a college, but a course in statistical mechanics changed the direction of my professional life. In the statistical mechanics course, I was awestruck that macroscopic properties of matter can be computed from molecular interactions using simple principles of probability and statistics. I decided switch fields from chemical engineering to studying biomolecules. As I started my Ph.D in biochemistry, I was inspired by the idea that the three-dimensional structure of a protein could be computed from its primary sequence. In Prof. David Baker’s laboratory (University of Washington, Seattle), I developed new computational methods to accurately predict three-dimensional structure of proteins rivaling experimental structures determined by X-ray or NMR. When I joined Prof. George Church’s group (Harvard Medical School) for postdoctoral training, my vision was to forge a new path to engineer proteins and biosynthetic pathways through the synergy of computational methods and high-throughput assays. Through biosensor-guided laboratory evolution, I engineered E. coli to overproduce a valuable natural product. Since biosensors are essential for engineering new cellular regulation, I developed a method to design new biosensors for cellular metabolites and valuable chemicals. As an independent investigator, my laboratory takes a systems and synthetic biology approach to understanding and designing biology at multiple scales: proteins, transcription regulation, metabolic pathways and whole organisms.

Melissa Takahashi

Melissa Takahashi is an Assistant Professor of Biology at California State University Northridge. She received her Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University and did postdoctoral research with James J. Collins at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Takahashi lab studies the biological principles behind RNA gene regulation in bacteria. A major focus of the lab is understanding and combating the roles of RNA regulation in antibiotic resistance mechanisms. The lab uses cell-free transcription-translation platforms to investigate these mechanisms.

Kate Adamala

Kate Adamala is a biochemist building synthetic cells. Her research aims at understanding chemical principles of biology, using artificial cells to create new tools for bioengineering, drug development, and basic research. Kate’s research spans questions from the origin and earliest evolution of life, using synthetic biology to colonize space, to the future of biotechnology and medicine.

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