Profiles

  • Patrick Cirino

    Patrick Cirino is Associate Professor in the Departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Biology and Biochemistry, at the University of Houston (Houston, TX). He received his PhD degree in chemical engineering from The California Institute of Technology, working with advisor Frances Arnold in the area of cytochrome P450 directed evolution. He then worked as a postdoctoral research associate in microbiology at the University of Florida, under Lonnie Ingram. Current research at the University of Houston incorporates directed evolution and synthetic biology to study and engineer protein-based sensors, biosynthesis pathways, and biocatalysts for production of natural products and functionalization of hydrocarbons.

  • Nima Hajinajaf

    Nima Hajinajaf is currently a Ph.D. student of Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University in Prof. Varman’s Lab. He received his master’s in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tehran. His previous work was on “Photobioreactor optimization for CO2 removal and wastewater treatment by microalgae”. Currently, his work is on the Metabolic Engineering of Cyanobacteria and Bacteria to produce chemicals

  • Eric Lee

    Eric recently received his PhD in Infectious Diseases and Immunity at the University of California, Berkeley. In graduate school, he studied isoprenoid metabolism in the bacterial pathogen Listeria monocytogenes. Outside of the lab, he was an active member of the Science Policy Group at Berkeley and was involved with science advocacy at the local, state, and federal levels, most notably by working with Assemblymember Bill Quirk to propose California Assembly Bill 1178, which aimed to increase labeling standards for over-the-counter probiotic supplements. In his spare time, he enjoys windsurfing at the Berkeley marina. He will primarily be working with the EBRC Roadmapping Working Group.

  • Becky Mackelprang

    Becky Mackelprang is the Director for Security Programs at the Engineering Biology Research Consortium. She leads EBRC’s Security Focus Area, bringing stakeholders across academia, industry, and government together to integrate security awareness into the policy and practice of engineering biology. Becky leads the development of commentary and recommendations on issues such as screening by synthetic DNA providers and the security implications at the intersection of artificial intelligence and engineering biology. She has implemented strategies to incorporate security into researcher education and training. Becky is committed to supporting an engineering biology research and development ecosystem that maximizes societal benefit while using a multi-faceted approach to support safe, secure, and productive innovation. Previously, Becky was an EBRC Science Policy Postdoctoral Scholar, an AAAS Mass Media Fellow, a science communication postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, and received her Ph.D. in Plant Biology from UC Berkeley.

  • Gene Olinger

    Dr. Gene Olinger is the Director of the Galveston National Laboratory and a Professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB). He also serves as the Sealy Distinguished University Chair in Tropical & Emerging Virology and Co-Director of the Scholarly Concentration in Translational Research (SciTR). For over 20 years, Dr. Olinger has conducted and supervised in vitro and in vivo research in maximum biocontainment laboratories (BSL-2 to BSL-4) across government, industry, and academic institutions. His work has focused on high-consequence pathogens, global health security, and biodefense. Internationally recognized as a subject matter expert in virology, immunology, biorisk, biosecurity, and biosafety, he has played a critical role in outbreak response efforts, coordinating diagnostic, serological, and clinical assays to monitor patients during and after epidemics. Dr. Olinger has extensive experience in the development of medical countermeasures, including prophylactic treatments, vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics. In recent years, he has expanded his expertise to synthetic biology, AI/ML as well as innovative workforce development through mixed-reality and blended learning, science policy, and bioeconomy team-building.

  • Matthew Owens

    Matt was an early team member of the NYC-based global education start-up, General Assembly, and helped spearhead GA’s first programs in NYC and Los Angeles. Before this, he worked as a strategy consultant with Stax, Inc. in Boston and as an analyst for a SF-based start-up, Gratio Capital. Matt has also worked with the founding teams of several science based ventures, including Agile Sciences and Innova Dynamics. He is a graduate of the Management and Technology and Integrated Product Design (MSE) programs at the University of Pennsylvania. In Philadelphia, Matt served on the board of Philly Startup Leaders and as an Engagement Manager for the cleantech practice of Wharton’s Small Business Development Center. He is an avid runner and when not at Harlem Biospace he can likely be found running through the city.

  • Arul M Varman

  • Gul Sadiq Afshan

    Dr. Gul Sadiq Afshan is a talented biochemist and molecular biologist with 30 years’ teaching, research, and program development experience. She acquired her Ph. D at the University of WI, Milwaukee (UWM) and her post-doctorate at the School of Medicine and Public Health -University of WI, Madison. She envisioned, founded (2009) and governed (2009-2017) the stand-alone, and innovative undergraduate BioMolecular Engineering degree program, as a founding director, that attracts 50% female student population sustainably at the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE). She is a passionate and effective teacher with extensive industry and community outreach experience. She is a recipient of over $6 million in grants from private and governmental bodies like NSF and NIH and is also a recipient of ASEE North Midwest Outstanding Educator Award, Outstanding Mentor Award, and Falk Excellent Engineering Educator Award. She also serves as an affiliate professor for the USA national PLTW program and has been a leader for bringing many university-level curricula, assessment, vision change, and mindset projects to fruition. She currently is a full professor at MSOE teaching BioMolecular Engineering.

  • Arren Liu

    Arren Liu is a postdoctoral research fellow at Johns Hopkins University working with Dr. Jonathan Lynch on unravelling host-microbiota interactions and engineering microbiota for health applications. Arren received his B.S. in Genetics at Purdue University, where he completed an honors research thesis under the guidance of Dr. Kevin Solomon. Arren received his Ph.D. in Biological Design at Arizona State University, where he worked with Dr. David Nielsen and Dr. Arul Varman on metabolic engineering of microbes for the biomanufacturing of petrochemical alternatives from lignocellulosic biomass. Arren is the current EBRC SPA Membership chair and is also a part of the DEI committee for SIMB.

     

  • Robert Friedman

    Robert Friedman is Vice President for Policy and University Relations at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). Friedman directs JCVI’s Policy Center, which examines the societal and policy implications of genomics, synthetic biology, and other areas of modern biology and biomedicine. Friedman is also a Professor of Practice at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy (GPS) and is a member of the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on Synthetic Biology of the international Convention on Biological Diversity.

    Earlier, Friedman was a Senior Associate at the Office of Technology Assessment, U.S. Congress (OTA). For 16 years, he advised Congressional committees on issues involving science and technology policy. Friedman received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in Ecological Systems Analysis, concentrating in ecology, environmental engineering, and systems analysis. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  • Philip Romero

    Philip Romero is an Assistant Professor in Biochemistry and Chemical & Biological Engineering at UW-Madison.  He received his PhD in Biochemistry from Caltech and conducted postdoctoral research at UCSF.  The Romero laboratory applies tools from statistics and machine learning to design proteins for broad applications in medicine, chemical production, and bioenergy.  Dr. Romero has received the Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award (2016), the NIH Outstanding Investigator Award (2016), the Shaw Scientist Award (2018), and the WARF Innovation Award (2019).

  • Michael Koepke

    Michael is a pioneer in genetic engineering and strain development of gas fermenting organisms to convert carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide to useful products. His research on Clostridium ljungdahlii demonstrated for the first time that gas fermenting acetogens can be genetically modified and provided a first genome and genetic blueprint of such an organism.

    Since 2009, Michael is Director of Synthetic Biology at LanzaTech, a company that has developed a proprietary gas fermentation process that is revolutionizing the way the world thinks about waste carbon by treating it as an opportunity instead of a liability. Michael and his team are responsible for development of genetic tools and synthetic pathways as well as strain engineering of LanzaTech’s proprietary gas fermenting organisms to optimize performance of the process and expand the product portfolio. Michael leads several of LanzaTech R&D collaborations with both industrial and academic partners.

    Michael has over 15 years of experience working with clostridia and gas fermenting organisms and holds a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Biotechnology from University of Ulm, Germany. Michael authored over 100 patents and over 30 peer reviewed articles and book chapters. Michael also contributed as scientific advisor to the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and co-organizer of international conferences as the 2018 Foundations of Systems Biology (FOSBE) and Biochemical and Molecular Engineering XXII and has been awarded the 2015 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge award for Greener Synthetic Pathways by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and American Chemical Society (ACS).

  • Aditya Kunjapur

    Dr. Aditya Kunjapur began as an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware in December 2018. His lab focuses on expanding the repertoire of microbial chemistry with an emphasis on enabling new chemical functional groups in living contexts. Dr. Kunjapur received his doctoral degree from MIT in 2015, where he trained under Dr. Kristala Prather and enabled aldehyde biosynthesis in E. coli. Afterwards, he performed postdoctoral research under the supervision of Dr. George Church at Harvard Medical School, where he designed platforms to improve the fidelity of non-standard amino acid incorporation into proteins. Dr. Kunjapur was previously Co-Chair of the Synberc Student and Postdoc Association, the precursor to the EBRC. In 2019, Dr. Kunjapur was awarded an Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative Fellowship.

  • Chris Dupont

    Dr. Chris Dupont is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Environment and Sustainability, Human Health, and Synthetic Biology at JCVI. His primary research focus is on the genomics, physiology, and evolution of microbiomes, both environmental and organismal. This involves synthetic biology enabled work with model organisms or ecosystems as well as sequencing enabled analyses of host-microbe interactions.

    Prior to joining JCVI, Chris received his Ph.D. in Oceanography and Marine Biology from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, as well as a Bachelor’s in Natural Resources and a Master’s of Biological and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University.

  • Nikhil Nair

    After receiving his B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University in 2003, Nikhil Nair worked at Bristol-Myers Squibb as a manufacturing research scientist in biotechnology purification development. He then went on to receive his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign in 2006 and 2010, respectively. As a graduate student, he developed processes for the production of the sugar substitute xylitol using E. coli and the biofuel butanol using yeast, via a combination of protein and genome engineering approaches. He joined Tufts after completing a postdoctoral fellowship in microbiology and immunobiology at the Harvard Medical School under the guidance of Professor Ann Hochschild.

  • Alanna Schepartz

    Professor Schepartz’s research group is interested in questions that span the chemistry-biology continuum. We seek to establish new knowledge about the chemistry of complex cellular processes and apply this knowledge to design or discover molecules–both small and large–with unique or useful properties. We apply the tools of organic synthesis, biochemistry, biophysics, and structural, molecular, and synthetic biology in our work. Current projects focus on (1) repurposing the ribosome to biosynthesize sequence-defined chemical polymers and polyketides; (2) exploring and improving novel tools for trafficking proteins to the cytosol and nucleus for therapeutic applications; (3) understanding the mechanism by which chemical information is transported through cellular membranes; and (4) developing new probes and fluorophores to image organelle dynamics at super-resolution for highly extended times and in multiple colors

  • Mark Blenner

    My research group addresses big problems in sustainability, human health, national defense, and space exploration – using synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, genomics & systems biology, and protein engineering. We are most interested in derisking and speeding up cell line development. We work mostly in eukaryotic systems (non-model yeast and mammalian cells) as well as bacteria.

  • Michael Nestor

    Dr. Michael W. Nestor is the Director of Neural Stem Cell Research The Hussman Institute for Autism and Co-Chair, Neural Stem Cell Working Group, Center for Stem Cell Biology & Regenerative Medicine at the University of Maryland, School of Medicine. Dr. Nestor received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from The University of Maryland, School of Medicine and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the National Institutes of Health, Rutgers University as an NIH IRACDA Fellow, and at The New York Stem Cell Foundation, where he was also a Staff Scientist. Dr. Nestor is an AAAS Executive Branch Science & Technology Policy Fellow in the Office of Science and Advanced Scientific Computing Research in the Department of Energy where he is focused on the biosecurity and synthetic biology portfolios in the DOE. Michael is also a Adviser at The University of Maryland, Maryland Momentum Fund/UM Ventures-Department of Technology Transfer and the Abell Foundation. Dr. Nestor is a neurophysiologist with 15 years of experience and a focus on electrophysiology, neural stem cell biology, human genetics and project management. His laboratory works on assay development with an emphasis on cell based pre-clinical high throughput drug screens and phenotyping assays involving human iPSC-derived cortical organoids from individuals with autism.

  • Jeffrey Gralnick

    Jeffrey Gralnick is a bacterial physiologist and geneticist who earned his PhD in Bacteriology with Diana Downs at University of Wisconsin – Madison. He began working with the environmental bacterium Shewanella oneidensis as a postdoc at Caltech with Dianne Newman. In 2005 he started his lab at the University of Minnesota BioTechnology Institute focusing on extracellular electron transfer in environmental bacteria that make a living by transforming redox reactive metals. His lab uses synthetic biology to both engineer and understand these usual microbes.

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