Profiles

  • Elizabeth Bayha

    Betsy Bayha is on Zymergen’s Learning and Development team, managing programs aimed at developing leadership skills for employees.

    She graduated from San Francisco State University in May 2020 with a Master of Science degree in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, returning to school after a ten-year career as a documentary film producer for Lucasfilm and PBS.

    Betsy also worked at the UCSF School of Medicine on the Bridges curriculum transformation initiative for first-and second-year Med-school students. She has an undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

  • S Venkata Mohan

    Dr. S. Venkata Mohan is working as a Scientist in CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (CSIR-IICT), Hyderabad since 1998. He has done his B.Tech (Civil Engineering), M.Tech (Environmental Engineering) and Doctoral research in engineering discipline from Sri Venkateswara University, Tirupati. He was Visiting Professor at Kyoto University (2005), Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Fellow at Technical University of Munich, Germany (2001-02) and Kyung Hee International Fellow, South Korea (2018). Dr Mohan research majorly intended to understand and respond to the human-induced environmental change in the framework of sustainability in the interface of environment and bioengineering. He specifically explored the potential of negatively valued waste as viable feedstock for harnessing clean energy and biomaterials by developing novel and sustainable technologies through nexus approach. His main research interests are in the areas of Advanced Waste Remediation, Aciodogenesis, Microbial Electrogenesis, Photosynthesis, CO2 biosequestration, Circular Bioeconomy, Self-regenerative systems and Biorefinery. He also undertook various research projects associated with societal relevance and industrial/consultancy projects in the area of environment and management. He has successfully demonstrated the production of Low carbon (Bio)Hydrogen with simultaneous waste remediation at pilot scale and established a first of its kind waste biorefinery platform. Dr Mohan authored more than 350 research articles, 60 chapters for books, edited 4 books and has 9 patents. His publications have more than 18,900 citations with an h-index of 75 (Google Scholar). He has guided 27 PhDs, 2 M.Phils and more than 100 M.Tech/B.Tech/M.Sc students.

    Dr Mohan is recipient of the coveted ‘Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar (SSB) Prize’ for the year 2014 in Engineering Sciences from the Government of India. He also received several awards and honors, which include, ‘DBT-Tata Innovation Fellow 2018’ by Department

  • Renee Wegrzyn

    Renee is a Vice President of Business Development at Ginkgo Bioworks. Prior to Ginkgo, she was Program Manager in the Biological Technologies Office (BTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where she leveraged the tools of synthetic biology and gene editing to enhance biosecurity, support the domestic bioeconomy, and outpace infectious disease. Her DARPA portfolio included the Living Foundries: 1000 Molecules, Safe Genes, Preemptive Expression of Protective Alleles and Response Elements (PREPARE), and Detect it with Gene Editing (DIGET) programs. Prior to joining DARPA as a PM, Renee led teams in private industry in the areas of biosecurity, gene therapies, emerging infectious disease, neuromodulation, synthetic biology, and diagnostics. Renee holds a PhD and BS in Applied Biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, was a Fellow in the Center for Health Security Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative (ELBI), and completed her postdoctoral training as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow in Heidelberg, Germany.

  • George Lu

    George Lu obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of Alberta in Canada, before moving to the UC San Diego for his Ph.D. study on protein structural biology. He then became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Mikhail Shapiro at Caltech, where he focused on the engineering of gas-filled protein nanostructures for biological imaging and cellular control. Dr. Lu was previously awarded the Young Investigator of the Year from the World Molecular Imaging Society for his work on the development of acoustically erasable MRI reporter genes. The independent lab was newly established in the Bioengineering Department at Rice University in 2020 with the support of the NIH Pathway-to-independence (K99/R00) and the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar awards.

  • Marilene Pavan

    Currently working as Scientist at LanzaTech Inc., I am a professional with 12+ years of experience in the fields of synthetic biology, metabolic engineering and biomanufacturing. Expertise also include: partnerships (prospection and management), people management and mentorship, fundraising, business development, writing of grants, patents, and scientific articles, project management, budget management, scientific consulting, planning of scientific conferences, speaker.

  • Peter Chung

    Peter J. Chung is an incoming Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southern California, beginning January 2021.

    He was previously a Kadanoff-Rice Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago studying proteins involved in Parkinson’s disease. He received his PhD in physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and undergraduate degrees in physics and materials engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

  • Ying Wang

    I am a postdoctoral scholar working in the Northen Group at Berkeley Lab. I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2019. I am broadly interested in addressing soil health and sustainable agriculture under global change.

  • Calin Plesa

    Calin Plesa is an Assistant Professor in the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact at the University of Oregon. He received a BASc in Engineering Physics from Simon Fraser University, a MSc in Nanoscience from Chalmers University of Technology, and a PhD from Delft University of Technology in Bionanoscience. As an HFSP Fellow in the Kosuri lab at UCLA he developed DropSynth, a low-cost scalable method to synthesize thousands of genes. Calin holds a CASI award from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and started his lab at the University of Oregon in 2019.

    The Plesa lab focuses on accelerating the pace at which we understand and engineer biological protein-based systems. Towards this end, we develop new technologies for gene synthesis, multiplex functional assays, in-vivo mutagenesis, and genotype-phenotype linkages for a number of different research areas and applications. These allow us to both access the huge sequence diversity present in natural systems as well as carry out testing of rationally designed hypotheses encoded onto DNA at much larger scales than previously possible.

  • Tetsuhiro Harimoto

    I received my BS in pharmacology and toxicology from the University of Toronto. Prior to graduate school, I worked at Morgan Stanley as an equity research associate. I joined my current lab in 2016 with the support from the Honjo fellowship (2016-2020) and NIH NCI F99/K00 award (2020-).

  • Nathan Johns

    I am originally from Michigan where I earned a B.S. in Microbiology from Michigan State University. Shortly after I worked with Harris Wang and George Church at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute. I did my PhD research in Systems Biology at Columbia University with Harris Wang. My research was focused on developing high-throughput methods for characterizing regulatory sequences in diverse bacterial species. In 2019 I began postdoctoral research with Michael Fischbach at Stanford University where I am developing genetic tools for human commensal bacterial species.

  • Emily Fulk

    I am a PhD student in the Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology program at Rice University, where I develop synthetic biology tools to understand how microbes in soils and marine sediments interact with their environments. I’m jazzed about the potential for synthetic biology to provide new options for low-carbon energy, biodegradable materials, and sustainable agriculture as well as a better understanding of Earth processes. I hope to continue in these fields throughout my career.

    While at Rice, I founded a graduate student group dedicated to promoting sustainable practices on campus and have been active in pursuing science communication and science policy experiences. Prior to graduate school, I graduated with a BS in chemical engineering from Northwestern and spent a year working at the National Renewable Energy Lab.

    My non-science alter ego specializes in educational explosions at the Houston Museum of Natural Science (where I volunteer as a docent), climbing rocks, and eating lots of snacks.

  • Heba Sailem

    Dr Heba Sailem is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering and the Big Data Institute. Her expertise transcends computer vision, image informatics, and system genetics which allows her to bring a unique perspective to tackling important challenges in cancer biology. She has pioneered the use of computational methods for knowledge discovery from large scale imaging data. Her work includes developing image analysis algorithms, image informatics, data visualisation and integration.

  • David Mai

  • David Shepherd

    David Shepherd is a Program Manager for the Department of Homeland Security, in its Science and Technology Directorate. He manages projects that help DHS and the interagency understand threats and risks stemming from biological agents and related advances. His projects range from in-depth studies of threats to creating measures to mitigate those risks and threats, with emphasis on efforts to build intergovernmental awareness and understanding. Recently Mr. Shepherd has started projects to bring the government community and the commercial community closer together to build the collaborative means to address 21st century threats, including risks to the bioeconomy. He also manages the Hazard Knowledge Center within DHS S&T’s Probablistic Awareness of National Threats, Hazards and Risks (PANTHR) program, and is S&T’s liaison to the DOD’s Combatting Terrorism Technical Support Office. Mr. Shepherd has been a federal program manager working in threat and risk awareness and reduction for over two decades. He has degrees in electrical engineering, history, and telecommunications.

  • Athanasios Mantalaris

    Athanasios (Sakis) Mantalaris is Professor in the W.H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech & Emory since August 2018. Prior to his move to Atlanta, he was Professor of BioSystems Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Imperial College London. He received his PhD (2000) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Rochester. His expertise is in modelling of biological systems and bioprocesses with a focus on mammalian cell culture systems, stem cell bioprocessing, and tissue engineering. He has published over 170 original manuscripts, co-edited one book, and holds several patents with several more pending. He has received several awards including the Junior Moulton Award for best paper by the Institute of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) in 2004. In 2012, he was elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical & Biological Engineering and in 2013 he was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Award. In 2015, he was awarded the Donald Medal by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) for his contributions to biochemical engineering.

  • Sam Raj

  • Xiaojing Gao

    Dr. Xiaojing Gao is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He received a B.S. in Biology from Peking University and a Ph.D. in Biology from Stanford University. He received his postdoctoral training from Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. His lab tackles fundamental engineering challenges across different levels of complexity, such as (1) protein components that minimize their crosstalk with human cells and immunogenicity, (2) biomolecular circuits that function robustly in different cells and are easy to deliver, (3) multicellular consortia that communicate through scalable channels, and (4) therapeutic modules that interface with physiological inputs/outputs. Their engineering targets include biomolecules, molecular circuits, viruses, and cells, and their approach combines quantitative experimental analysis with computational simulation. The molecular tools they build will be applied to diverse fields such as immunology, neurobiology, and cancer therapy.

  • David Karig

  • Yinjie Tang

    Dr. Yinjie Tang did his BS/MS in chemical engineering at Tianjin University. He obtained his PhD at University of Washington and his research was on kinetic modeling of marine sediment remediation. He did his postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He joined Washington University In 2008 and was promoted to full professor in 2018. His research focuses on algal engineering, metabolic flux analysis, and process modeling.

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