Profiles

  • Tom Tubon

    Thomas Tubon is currently appointed as the Chief Workforce Development Officer for the recently-funded BioIndustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE) Manufacturing Innovation Institute. BioMADE joins eight DoD-sponsored institutes as part of the Manufacturing USA network and is the16th institute invested in creating an end-to-end ecosystems for domestic manufacturing to secure America’s future through manufacturing innovation, education, and collaboration. Dr. Tubon leads the Education and Workforce Development initiatives of the BioMADE Institute, with a focus on building employment readiness for bioindustrial manufacturing and engineering biology.

    Prior to his appointment with the BioMADE MII, Dr. Tubon served as a Professor in the Biotechnology Program at Madison Area Technical College for 13 years. During this time, he led several National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education grant projects to establish and scale an emerging technology program in Stem Cells and Cell Manufacturing and oversee a Coordination Network project for Advanced Manufacturing of Cell and Tissue Products. While at Madison College, Dr. Tubon was responsible for the development of bioscience workforce and strategic implementation of programs for local, regional, and national-level adoption and scale-up. In this role, he has facilitated the creation of a broad network of industry, community, and academic stakeholders, that promote career pathways in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Dr. Tubon also serves as a subject matter expert with the NSF ATE Mentor Connect and Project Vision Programs.

    Since 2019, Dr. Tubon has served as a CoPI on the NSF ATE InnovATEBIO Center for Biotechnology Education, and the NSF Advancing Research Impact in Society (ARIS) Center leadership team for workforce development and strategic partnerships.
    Dr. Tubon holds a Ph.D. in Molecular Genetics from Stony Brook University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a BS in Molecular Biology from San Diego State University.

  • Oliver May

    I have studied Technical Biology at the University of Stuttgart (Germany) and did a postdoc at Caltech (Arnold Lab) on Evolutionary Engineering of Enzymes. After my broad biotech education, I joined industry in 2000 to learn about development and implementation of Biotransformation as well we fermentation processes. After several development steps at my first industrial employer (former Degussa, now called Evonik Industries) I joined DSM in 2006. There I was responsible for a team to develop biocatalytic processes for pharma customers. In 2011 I accepted the job as R&D Director in our Innovation center where we developed biobased processes in the biofuels and bioplastic intermediates field. In 2015 I joined our Food Ingredients business as responsible Scientist for Biochemistry and Microbiology. In 2019 I joined our Animal and Human Nutrition business as Science Fellow for Biotechnology where we developed products and processes in the Nutritional Lipids, Carotenoids and Vitamins field. Since 2022 I am Senior Director Biotechnology and lead our Biotech R&D teams in Lexington (MA) and Columbia (Maryland).

  • Tim Kilgore

    I received my Masters of Science degree from George Mason University in 2007 and have been working with Government organizations over the past 20 years focused on helping these organizations understand advancements in biological sciences and how that can impact their mission space, specifically chemical and biological defense. I am employed with MITRE, a Federally Funded Research Development Center, where I continue to advise programs within the US Government on these areas.

  • Caroline Kennedy

    Caroline Kennedy is a Lead Biotechnologist and Project Leader at The MITRE Corporation. She has worked there for the past eight years, during which she has supported numerous US Government organizations in biodefense and biosecurity matters, both domestic and international. For the past four years, much of her support has been in the field of One Health Security—a timely topic considering the zoonotic origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Ms. Kennedy is also involved in MITRE’s internal R&D work program. She is a co-PI on a review of analytic methods used to detect and characterize veterinary antibiotics in surface water and is working as a Program Thrust Lead for Dr. Marc Salit’s Synthetic Biology R&D program. Ms. Kennedy enjoys working with students and has been an undergraduate team iGEM mentor as well as the MITRE POC for a new MIT/Lincoln Lab/MITRE co-developed Beaver Works Summer Institute course on Computational Biology and the Microbiome. Ms. Kennedy received her BA in Biology from the University of Virginia and is completing her MPH in Epidemiology at George Mason University in May 2022. She is also a mother of two young children and passionate about helping junior employees develop a healthy work/life balance, find their passion, and advocate for themselves as they progress in their careers.

  • Matthew Downs

    My Bachelor’s degree is in Material Science & Engineering focusing on Polymers from University of Florida and received my PhD in Biomedical Engineering focusing on Bioimaging & Neuroscience from Columbia University. I am currently a Lead Biomedical Engineer at the MITRE Corporation and work on projects spaning from synthetic bioimaging, medical injury standards, biotechnology development, and synthetic biology. This includes regular interactions and partnerships with members of Government, industry, and academia.

  • Stephen Gasior

    My role at Corteva is as a molecular biologist working to enhance and develop new technologies for making recombination DNA vectors. But, I was an academic grad student and postdoc before teaching college biology for 9 years. Then I joined Corteva in 2016. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/slgasior/)

  • Maxime Boneza

    I am currently a third year PhD Candidate in the Biochemistry Molecular Biology and Biophysics (BMBB) program at the University of Minnesota Twin-Cities. Before I joined the BMBB program, I graduated from Southwestern University, in Georgetown Texas, with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 2016. I then spent 3 years as a Lab Technician for Eco-Services in Houston Texas, which is a subsidiary of PQ Corporation specializing in sulfuric acid manufacturing.

  • Michaela Jones

    Michaela is a postdoctoral researcher in Otto Cordero’s Lab at MIT working to expand the metabolic function of non-model ocean microbes. Prior to starting her postdoc, she completed her graduate work with Aditya Kunjapur at University of Delaware where she developed a new pathway for biosynthesis of non-standard amino acids and engineered a bacterial strain that was dependent on a non-standard amino acid for growth that can persist in soil microenvironments to build towards safely deployable synthetic microbes. As an EBRC board member, she serves as EMUMS chair to help provide academic mentorship to undergraduate and Master’s students interested in engineering biology.

  • Sanjeeva K Murali

    Sanjeeva is a PhD student in Mansell lab at Iowa state university. His research work focuses on developing novel prebiotic-probiotic pairs for gut microbiome engineer. Prior to this, he completed his masters from IIT Guwahati, where he focused on constructing metabolic pathway to convert dairy waste to D-Lactic acid. Currently, he serves as a member of the EBRC SPA Board and works as the liaison to the Policy and International Engagement group. In addition, he also worked as a downstream process engineer for monoclonal antibody purification at Dr. Reddy Laboratories in India. Outside research, he enjoys watching cricket, playing badminton, running etc. 

  • Edward Kalkreuter

    Edward is a postdoctoral fellow in the Ben Shen lab at UF Scripps. His research focuses on developing and utilizing synthetic biology approaches for natural product discovery and biosynthetic engineering, with an emphasis on biosynthetic gene cluster regulation. Prior to his postdoctoral position, he obtained his Ph.D. in the Gavin Williams lab at North Carolina State University where he engineered polyketide synthases and constructed transcription factor-based biosensors.

  • Keith Yamamoto

    Dr. Keith R. Yamamoto is vice chancellor for science policy and strategy, director of precision medicine, and professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at UCSF. After earning his PhD from Princeton University, Yamamoto joined the UCSF faculty in 1976. His research has focused on signaling and transcriptional regulation by nuclear receptors; he uses mechanistic and systems approaches to pursue these problems in pure molecules, cells and whole organisms. He has led or served on numerous national committees focused on public and scientific policy, public understanding and support of biological research, science education, and diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism; he currently chairs the Coalition for the Life Sciences, co-chairs the NASEM Roundtable on Aligning Incentives for Open Science, and sits on the Board of Directors of the Public Library of Science, the Board of Directors of Rapid Science, the Governing Board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, the Board of Counselors for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, and the Advisory Board for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He has chaired or served on many committees that oversee training and the biomedical workforce, research funding, and the process of peer review and the policies that govern it at NIH. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Microbiology, and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  • Nathan Crook

  • Jeff Nivala

    ​I’m Jeff Nivala, a Research Assistant Professor in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. I work closely with other faculty and students as part of the Molecular Information Systems Lab. My scientific interests are focused on technology development with molecular and synthetic biology. My post-doctoral work was performed in George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School. I was a graduate student fellow of the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3) as a PhD student in the UCSC Nanopore Group with Mark Akeson, and a Washington Research Foundation Fellow in David Baker’s lab during my undergraduate work.

  • Gregory Koblentz

    Gregory D. Koblentz is an Associate Professor and Director of the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government. The Biodefense Graduate Program is a multidisciplinary research and education program designed to prepare students to work on issues at the nexus of health, science, and security. He also directs the Summer Workshop on Pandemics and Global Health Security at the Schar School and is the Editor-in-Chief of The Pandora Report. Dr. Koblentz is a member of the Scientist Working Group on Biological and Chemical Security at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. He serves as a pro bono advisor for the Open Society Justice Initiative and DARPA, as a consultant for the Stimson Center on their cheminformatics program, and is a member of the Biothreat Advisory Board of Heat Biologics. Dr. Koblentz is the author of Strategic Stability in the Second Nuclear Age (Council on Foreign Relations, 2014) and Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security (Cornell University Press, 2009) and co-author of Mapping Maximum Biological Containment Labs Globally (London: King’s College London, May 2021), Editing Biosecurity: Needs and Strategies for Governing Genome Editing (George Mason University and Stanford University, 2018), and Tracking Nuclear Proliferation: A Guide in Maps and Charts (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1998). His research and teaching focus on understanding the causes and consequences of the proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons to state and non-state actors and the impact of emerging technologies on international security. He received a PhD in political science from MIT and a MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School.

  • Kelsey Gray

  • Andrea Garza Elizondo

    Andrea is a postdoctoral research associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Dr. Carrie Eckert’s lab, working to domesticate non-model bacteria. As part of that, she is developing high-throughput methods to test genetic tools with robotic automation systems. Prior to this, Andrea earned her Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University, where she developed a bacterial transcriptional activation system in the lab of Dr. James Chappell.

  • David Riglar

    David has been a Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Sir Henry Dale Fellow in the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College London since 2019. His lab uses a combination of synthetic biology, imaging and sequencing based approaches to better understand the function of the gut and its microbiota during health and disease. Using this knowledge they are developing innovative technologies, such as living engineered probiotics, to probe and control the mammalian gut environment.

    Prior to starting his lab, David undertook his postdoc in Pamela Silver’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. As a Human Frontier Science Long-term Fellow and NHMRC/ RG Menzies Fellow, David’s work focussed on using synthetic biology approaches to engineer bacteria as tools to probe the mammalian gut environment.

    In 2013, David completed his PhD with Jake Baum and Alan Cowman at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute (University of Melbourne) in Melbourne, Australia. His PhD research investigated how the parasites responsible for human malaria disease infect red blood cells using cutting-edge imaging platforms.

    David holds a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from the University of Melbourne.

  • Yue Han

    Yue is a Ph.D. candidate at the Styczynski lab at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on developing computational models for metabolic pathways toward effective strain design. Yue completed her undergraduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Chemical Engineering. In her free time, she enjoys watching movies and exploring the city.

  • Megan McSweeney

    Megan is a postdoctoral scholar in the Jewett Lab at Stanford University. She earned her BS in chemical engineering from the University of Rhode Island—with minors in chemistry, mathematics, and music performance—and her PhD in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Georgia Tech. Her PhD work focused on using cell-free expression systems to engineer diagnostic platforms for point-of-care biosensing applications. As an EBRC SPA member, Megan serves as a liaison to the education working group and co-chair for EMUMS.

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