Profiles

  • Felicia Oentoro

    Felicia is a chemical engineering PhD student at Georgia Tech, where she works in the Styczynski lab. She works with cell-free systems, and their applications in affordable biosensors. Prior to this, she did her undergraduate in Chemical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin and worked at the nonprofit Cleveland Water Alliance for a few years. In her free time, she enjoys running, she enjoys running, climbing, yoga, and taking pottery classes.

  • Elizabeth Kellogg

    Elizabeth Kellogg did her undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley and received a PhD from the University of Washington, working on computational biology in the group of David Baker. She then became a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Eva Nogales at UC Berkeley using cryo-electron microscopy. Her scientific background results in a scientific approach that seeks to understand biology with a quantitative perspective, relying on biological structure determination and design. Since starting her own group at Cornell University in 2019, Dr. Kellogg has sought to understand how transposons reshape genomes and how they can be repurposed as genome-editing tools. In particular, her group has investigated the behavior and molecular mechanisms of programmable, CRISPR-associated transposons (CASTs), to determine how DNA integration is regulated spatially and temporally in a genomic context, using a combination of biochemical, structural, single-molecule and genetic approaches. Among other honors, Dr. Kellogg was selected as Pew Biomedical Scholar in 2021 and received the 2023 Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society. She joined St. Jude as an Associate Member in 2023.

  • Janet Standeven

    An educator with 28 years of classroom experience in Core Sciences, Social Sciences and Biotechnology. Founded the Lambert iGEM program in 2012. In 2022 Lambert’s team was named the Grand Prize Winner of the iGEM Jamboree. The iGEM competition is the leading collegiate competition in the field of synthetic biology. She is a 2022 recipient of a NIH SEPA grant with Dr. Bhamla of Georgia Institute of Technology. In collaboration with members of the Bhamla lab she leads students in research and development of synthetic biology projects that also include hardware and software components. Ongoing projects include the ElectroPen, a 23 cent electroporator and other frugal devices for extraction of DNA and quantification of data.
    Ms. Standeven received a BA in Anthropology and Social Studies Teaching Certificate from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. She earned her Master of Chemical Life Science from the University of Maryland in 2013. During her master’s studies she was a recipient of a G.I.F.T. fellowship with the Styczynski Group at Georgia Institute of Technology and subsequently received RET, support with the Styczynski group from 2014-2018. She is a recipient of numerous teaching awards and recognitions including Teacher of the Year in 2011 for Riverwatch Middle School, 2018 for Lambert High School, Forsyth County School STAR teacher in 2019 and 2023, in addition to being recognized as Biotechnology Teacher of the Year in Georgia for 2016. She was an attendee at the White House Bioeconomy Summit in 2019. She currently participates on the Human Practices committee for the iGEM foundation and serves as a Master Teacher for GABIO’s Rural Teacher Training Initiative.

  • Alexander Ditzel

    Dr. Ditzel is a postdoctoral researcher at the US Naval Research Laboratory, where he is working on synthetic bacteriophage development, addressing the global challenge of antibiotic resistance. As the founder and chairman of the Gogec competition, he is deeply committed to democratizing synthetic biology education, fostering accessibility and inclusivity in the field. Beyond the lab, Dr. Ditzel is interested in a variety of topics, such as geopolitics, artificial intelligence, and psychology.

  • Connor Hines

    Doctoral Candidate studying Prokaryotic and Archaeal metabolism and metabolic pathways. Interested in improving Methanosarcina acetivorans as a model organism. Currently working at Los Alamos National Laboratory under a SCGSR Fellowship.

  • Liyam Chitayat

    I am passionate about building programmable and evolveable interfaces between systems. Inspired by the evolvability of living systems, I studied my double major degree in Chemistry and Biology and completed Summa Cum Lauda (ranking among the top 10 female students in the faculty of exact sciences) at Tel Aviv University. During My MSc in biomedical engineering, I co-led the iGEM TAU team and executed my thesis research aiming to encode differential expression into genetic elements transformed into a microbiome, in light of lateral gene transfer.

    I was selected in 2022 to serve as a program officer in the Bioengineering Unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, where I won the accelerator prize for pioneering innovation and was the youngest member of the 40 under 40 list of “the marker” Israel. I am passionate about biotech democratization and outreach, which I have done by starting a “by student for student” biotech entrepreneurship nonprofit called Nucleate.

  • Gia-Bao Dam

  • Jiwoo Kim

    I am a graduate student in Silberg Lab at Rice University. My thesis is focused on studying the effect of water potential on the behaviors of soil microbes by engineering them to act as gas reporters. Outside of the lab, I am involved in the graduate student association of my department, and I like to hang out with my pets.

  • Gozde Demirer

    Gozde was born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey and received her B.S. in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Koc University in 2015. Gozde completed her Chemical Engineering Ph.D. at UC Berkeley with Prof. Markita Landry in 2020. During her Ph.D. studies, she developed nanotechnologies for plant genetic engineering. For her postdoctoral work, Gozde joined Prof. Siobhan Brady’s lab at UC Davis, where she studied nutrient use efficiency of tomato and developed high-throughput functional genomics tools to study transcriptional regulation in crops.

  • Jie Zhou

  • Robyn Alba

    I am a graduate student at Rice University in the synthetic biology lab of Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin where I study exoelectrogenic bacteria. My research seeks to elucidate extracellular electron transfer mechanisms in the probiotic bacteria for applications in biosensing and biocomputing. Before my time as a graduate student, I spent nine years as a music performer and educator, teaching students of all ages! I have carried my passion for education into my science research and hope to become a professor in the future.

  • Jérémie Marlhens

    I’m a graduate student with a background in mathematics, biology, and synthetic biology. I’ve worked on machine learning and conducted research in labs worldwide, in different areas of Biology. I’m passionate about research, eager to learn, and committed to ethical science. I look forward to being part of the EBRC community and collaborating on exciting synthetic biology projects.

  • Neil Dalvie

    I completed my PhD in chemical engineering at MIT in 2022, where I improved the manufacturing of therapeutic proteins by protein engineering and yeast genome engineering. Now, I am a Fellow in the Synthetic Biology Hive at Harvard Medical School and am supported by a Schmidt Science Fellowship for postdoctoral research. I studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and I am originally from San Diego, CA.

  • Abdul Muntakim Rafi

    I am a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology and later pursued my Master’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Windsor.
    My current research concentrates on employing machine learning to design cis-regulatory models, develop methods to interpret them, and explore ways to enhance their performance, contributing to a quantitative comprehension of cis-regulatory logic. I have expertise in various programming languages and machine learning libraries, publications in top-tier ML conferences, and experience of working as a machine learning engineer in software companies and startups.

  • Maya Kaul

  • César Aarón Villalobos

    I am a biotechnologist interested in bioengineering, especially the application of mathematical modelling to biomolecular systems and bacterial population dynamics. I work on plasmids, antibiotics, and genetic engineering.

  • Massimo Bellato

    I got my Master’s in Bioengineering at the University of Pavia – Italy, in the BMS lab headed by Prof. Paolo Magni, with a thesis on modeling metabolic burden in Synthetic biology. I then started a PhD in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics in the same laboratory, focusing on CRISPR interference genetic circuits and metabolic burden. I also spent a visiting period at the Del Vecchio laboratory – MIT.
    In the last years, I moved to the University of Padova where I’m starting in collaboration with other Professors a research line in medical synthetic biology, focusing on quorum quenching and phage engineering against AMR. I’ve also been PI for the Italian iGEM team 2023

  • Joshua Atkinson

    Dr. Atkinson’s research aims to use approaches from synthetic biology, protein engineering, biophysics and electrochemistry to understand and control how microbes and proteins transport electrons. The Atkinson Lab seeks to elucidate the critical role electron transport plays in energy and information processing in cells and microbial communities and to use this knowledge to engineer new biotechnologies that address societal challenges in sustainability, environmental monitoring & remediation, chemical synthesis, and resource recovery & extraction. Areas of current emphasis are the development and application of design rules for (i) how microorganisms use proteins to regulate electron transfer in metabolic networks, (ii) how electron flows shape the structure of microbial communities that impact geochemical cycles, and (iii) how living electronic materials can be built that couple the information processing and catalytic capabilities of biology with electrochemical devices.

  • Feilun Wu

    I received my BS in Biomedical Engineering from University of Virginia where I conducted research in systems biology, tissue engineering, and neuroscience. I joined Lingchong You’s Lab at Duke University for my PhD where I studied microbial community ecology using synthetic biology approaches, machine learning, and microfluidics. I am currently a research scientist working with John Glass at JCVI on expanding the toolkit for whole genome transplantation, which is a foundational technology that enabled the construction of the minimal cells.

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