Roadmap WG
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Efrain Rodriguez-Ocasio
Clay Wright is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech. His lab focuses on understanding and engineering chemical signaling pathways from plants and fungi. Clay received his BS in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from North Carolina State University and PhD in the same from Johns Hopkins University, where he worked with Professor Marc Ostermeier to engineer cancer therapeutic enzymes that are selectively active in the presence of a cancer marker. For his postdoctoral research, he worked with Professors Jennifer Nemhauser and Eric Klavins at University of Washington to study evolution and function of receptors for auxin, a critical plant growth hormone. Clay was recently awarded an NIH MIRA to further our understanding and engineering of chemically activated ubiquitin ligases, such as those that coordinate auxin signaling and other plant hormone signaling pathways.
Miguel Jimenez is an Assistant Professor at Boston University, where he runs el Microbial Integration Group. The group integrates engineered microorganisms with mechanical and electronic devices for applications in human health, agriculture, the environment, and entertainment.
Lynn Rothschild is passionate astrobiologist focusing on the origin and evolution of life on Earth and elsewhere, while at the same time pioneering the use of engineering biology to enable space exploration. Her research focuses on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere. A graduate of Yale, Indiana University and Brown, she has brought her imagination and creativity to the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, articulating a vision for the future of synthetic biology as an enabling technology for NASA’s missions, including human space exploration and astrobiology. From 2011 through 2019 she served as the faculty advisor of the Stanford-Brown iGEM team. Her lab tested these plans in space on in the PowerCell secondary payload on the DLR EuCROPIS satellite. A past-president of the Society of Protozoologists, she is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London, The California Academy of Sciences and the Explorer’s Club. She was awarded the Isaac Asimov Award from the American Humanist Association, and the Horace Mann Award from Brown University. She has been a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) fellow seven times. Lynn was formerly Professor (Adjunct) at Stanford where she taught “Astrobiology and Space Exploration” for a decade.
Nils is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Cell Science, University of Florida (UF). Before joining UF, Nils was a Research Engineer at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University and an Associate Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Space Science and Astrobiology Division. Nils holds a PhD in Metabolic Engineering from the University of Queensland, Australia and an engineer’s degree in Biochemical Engineering from the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany.
Nils’ research comprises the rational engineering of microbial metabolism to increase the carbon efficiency of biochemical pathways for the assimilation of single-carbon compounds and the conversion thereof into advanced biomaterials. This serves the overarching goal to create a sustainable chemical industry on Earth “on the way” to new frontiers: developing circular production platforms based on microbial biotechnology could one day also support crewed long-duration space-exploration missions and -settlement.
Elibio Rech, a molecular engineer, geneticist, Researcher at EMBRAPA, and Director of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Synthetic Biology, developed gene transfer technologies to produce commercial genetically modified plant products. Aim to contribute to the design, construction, and engineering of synthetic genomes, cell-free protein expression, and building cell and synthetic genetic circuits, combining top-down and bottom-up approaches within the synergies and intersections of the recombinant DNA technology for synthetic domestication of specific traits from biodiversity.
Dr. Leili Rohani is a Stem Cell Scientist at the School of Biomedical Engineering, University of British Columbia, and upcoming Research Scientist at MIT Synthetic Biology Center and Department of Biological Engineering. Her research has been focused on stem cells, regenerative medicine, cell therapy, and cell-fate engineering with the intent to provide a platform for future gene and precision therapies for heart diseases. She is passionate about combining tissue engineering, single-nuclei RNA sequencing and synthetic biology tools to create a human single cell atlas of heart disease as a basis for understanding, diagnosing, monitoring, and treating heart diseases. Her end goal is to look at the SynBio platform (tissue engineering, single nuclei RNAseq, synthetic biology) as a new vocabulary for disease studies to determine the ways in which cells and disease genes act, which cells are disrupted in disease, which programs change in them, what mechanisms underlie their (dis)regulation, how their cell-cell communications are affected, and what would be the impact of therapies. Beyond her research, she is passionate about science communication, networking, and collaboration.
Dr. Ania-Ariadna Baetica is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics at Drexel University. She received her BA degree from Princeton University in 2012 and her PhD from California Institute of Technology in 2018. Following her degrees, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California San Francisco.
Dr. Baetica’s group leverages control theory along with systems biology, synthetic biology, and computational science to solve biotechnological and medical challenges. Her group designs robust and modular synthetic biological circuits by incorporating layered feedback mechanisms.
I’m a new faculty at Texas A&M studying synthetic biology and control theory. Before moving to Texas, I completed four years of postdoctoral training in the Richard Murray Group at Caltech. I received my Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University in 2018, advised by Julius B. Lucks.
Aaron Schaller is a molecular biologist and entrepreneur with 10 years of experience in microbiology, molecular and cell biology, and immunology/virology. In May 2020 he co-founded MeliBio, Inc., a food company harnessing synthetic biology and medicinal plant science to produce the world’s first real honey without bees. Before starting MeliBio, Aaron completed his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley studying innate immunity in response to viral infection as an NSF graduate fellow. A combined passion for food, environmentalism, microbiology, and entrepreneurship led Aaron to co-found MeliBio, where he currently serves as CTO. Aaron believes that the future of planetary and human health lies in our ability to move away from animal-based food supplies towards more sustainable and logical options, and that microbiology can take us there.
Nicole Buan is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has broad expertise in microbial physiology, metabolism, and redox biochemistry. Dr. Buan recently co-founded the Archaea Power Hour virtual seminar series and serves as Associate Editor for Applied Environmental Microbiology and Frontiers in Microbiology (Microbial Physiology and Metabolism) journals. Dr. Buan began research as a high school student in Tucson, Arizona, where she did undergraduate thesis research on ATP-independent molecular chaperone proteins in plants under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Vierling at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a Howard Hughes Predoctoral Fellow in the lab of Jorge Escalante-Semerena. There, she made key contributions to understanding protein:protein interactions involved in coenzyme B12 synthesis in Salmonella, discovered the only known iron-sulfur-cluster-containing B12 adenosyltransferase enzyme, and investigated the use of B12 mimics as chemotherapeutic “Trojan horses”. Her graduate work was recognized by the Department of Bacteriology Herman Smythe Award for Outstanding PhD research. As a NIH Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of William Metcalf at the University of Illinois, Dr. Buan received training in methanogen genetics and characterized the terminal oxidase heterodisulfide reductase enzymes. At Nebraska, Dr. Buan and her students study redox biochemistry, systems, and synthetic biology in archaea, bacteria, and plants on various projects funded by NSF, NIH, USDA, Nebraska Center for Energy Sciences Research, Nebraska Corn Board, and the Water Environment Reuse Foundation. Buan lab research has been awarded two patents, and Dr. Buan is the owner of two biotech startups.
I am a popular science and nonfiction author. My most recent book was Planet of Microbes (University of Chicago Press, 2017). I’m writing a book called Programmable Planet: The Synthetic Biology Revolution to be published by Columbia University Press in fall, 2022.
Ithai started his academic path studying Industrial Engineering at Tel Aviv University, acquiring quantitative approaches to the analysis and design of complex systems. He then steered to neuroscience, embarking on a Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, investigating theoretically how the morphology and structure of neurons determine the dynamic interactions between synaptic inputs. Ithai then continued with postdoctoral training in Cambridge, UK and in Seattle, USA, this time doing experimental work on neural circuits in the tiny nematode worm C. elegans. Bringing together his passion for neurobiology and engineering, Ithai contributed to establishing a neuro-synthetic biology. Ithai joined the Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine in late 2017 where his lab is continuously studying and designing C. elegans neural circuits.
Dr. Lauren Junker is an innovation scout for Industrial Biotechnology Research at BASF. She has been a leader in the Industrial Biotechnology research group at BASF for the past 7 years where her teams research focused on microbiome research for personal care, microbial control solutions for personal care and animal nutrition and fermentation process optimization.
Interested in technologies and partners to accelerate Bioscience research at BASF in the areas of industrial biotechnology including industrial enzyme and biocatalyst engineering, strain engineering for bio-based chemical production, fermentation process optimization and microbiome research.
Previous roles include serving as a microbiologist and clinical research scientist within Johnson & Johnson’s Consumer Products Division. She earned her Ph.D. in Microbiology from Cornell University and did a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Harvard Medical School where she conducted research on microbial biofilms. At BASF, Dr. Junker and her team of biotechnologists work together with BASF’s Beauty Care Solutions, Care Chemicals to provide efficacious solutions for skin health, focusing on microbiome benefits.
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).
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.
Merja Penttilä is a research professor in biotechnology at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, and an adjunct professor in synthetic biology at Aalto University. Her expertise is on engineering of microbes for the production of fuels, chemicals, enzymes and materials. She has acted as the director of the Academy of Finland CoE on White biotechnology – Green chemistry, and is a PI in the current CoE on Molecular engineering of biosynthetic hybrid materials (Hyber). She has coordinated a large strategic project “Living Factories: Synthetic Biology for a sustainable Bioeconomy”, and led many EU level and industrial projects. She is acting an advisory board or committee member of a number of international organisations. She is the initiator of Synbio Powerhouse, an ecosystem to promote biotechnology and synthetic biology in Finland and beyond. She has total of 334 publications, 14 457 Web of science citations, and h-index of 70.
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.
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).